Beyond Good and Evil

Good news: It's coming to XBLA and PSN, with an HD upgrade.

And The Fandom Rejoiced.

Hi there. I've made a section for the sequel, if anyone is interested in elaborating on it. I know it's early, but it had to be done sooner or later.

Did the same for Rayman Origins.

I've been waiting for more concrete evidence before really elaborating.

Incidentally, I wouldn't get too attached to the parkour trailer's stuff, since most recent comments have indicated that Ancel is going to go for a RaymanOrigins-esque small team dev pattern, including using a 3-D version of the RaymanOrigins engine.

Yeah, I've heard that a few times, and I wonder how that would work. Rayman Origins uses the relatively simple Ubi-Art tools, where all characters and models are drawn. Also, The Other Wiki claims that Beyond Good&Evil 2 will use the Ly N engine that Rabbids Go Home and Red Steel 2 uses.

I still do trust the Parkour trailer to a certain degree, as the graphical style is very similar to the official one with Pey'j and the bee.

They're expanding on it, though. Ancel himself has said that they're switching to a 3-D version of the Ubi Art engine from Origins, and I trust him before Wikipedia.

Both trailers are from a project that, to my understanding, has been dumped and overhauled at least twice since then.

Beyond Good and Evil Forever. Calling it. =d

It certainly is looking that way, isn't it?

However, I think BGE 2 has the advantage of being one exceedingly revered game developer's baby. I've heard rumors (can't say how true they are, mind) that Ancel's threatened to quit a couple times over Ubi's issues with the project. The same rumors tend to say that Ubiart and Rayman Origins are their way of apologizing to him by letting him do what he wants for once.

One thing that especially makes me hopeful is that Ancel is working very closely with Christophe Heral—BGE's excellent composer—on Origins, and Heral himself has reassured multiple times that he's still also working with him for BGE 2. Ancel has clout, and if he wants to see the game made, I'm pretty sure he's willing to go to crazy lengths to do it.

We got Shantae: Risky's Revenge much the same way, so I'm not quite willing to give up yet.

Man, I wish I had known about the X-box announcement before. I've been trying to play the Steam PC port, and I cannot get through it using mouse-and-keyboard.

The PC version's controls (especially the lack of true joypad support) are more than a little baffling. Shame, really.

It's the first game to ever give me motion sickness. No lie.

The tossy-turneyness of the hovercraft, or the camera swooshes? :P

The camera swooshes, particularly when I screwed up the stealth and had to wrestle with the camera to find the way back to get away. This would happen quite a bit because my pure determined retardation ensured that I would always lift the ctrl button instead of w thus blowing my cover.

Yes, the camera is definitely a Stop Helping Me kind of thing.

So: Should I get BG&E HD, or spend it on a Borderlands expack?

• Have you played it before?
• Are you vulnerable to Hype Backlash?

If the answer to both of the above is "No," then definitely, by all means. If the answer to the first question is "Yes," then there's not really anything in the way of new content. If the answer to the second question is "Yes," then proceed with trepidation: It is a good game, yes, but it tends to get exalted to the point where a first-time player is bound to notice nothing but its flaws.

No and not really, so I guess I'll go for it! :D

Then have fun! :D

Although I do still warn of potential Hype Backlash. I mean, I love the game to death, but the way game journalists gush over it—without actually talking about it as a game half the time—makes me a bit twitchy.

Let's put it another way: Have you ever played a 3D Zelda game? Did you like it? If yes, buy it.

Even though I played, beat, and 100 percented a used PS 2 copy I got for like six bucks a year or two back I might just get the PS 3 HD port, just to support it.

edited 4th Mar '11 11:38:56 PM by Apocali

Perfect :D

People always make the Zelda comparison, but I'm not sure how fitting it is. It doesn't have huge puzzles like Zelda does, and there's those weird side-emphases on vehicle sections and stealth just kind of break it to me. Zelda also has an emphasis on exploration that isn't present in this game nearly as heavily. But I suppose it's common for action-adventure games to get compared to Zelda.

I would totally buy this HD version if I had an Xbox, though. For the reasons described . Yay support!

OoT, MM, and most especially TWW had stealth sections, though I admit they weren't a regular feature like in BG&E. TWW had a rather extensive vehicle section, all the others had Epona, and MM had some rather vehicle-like masks (especially Zora Link.) So far as core gameplay is concerned, BG&E is practically a carbon copy of Zelda (controls, inventory, map screen, dungeon design…), if perhaps rather simplified and a tad more shooty in places. While this means its gameplay is largely unoriginal, this also means its gameplay is solid and fun, which is presumably the tradeoff Ancel was aiming for.

Although Wind Waker did release before BGE, I don't know how apt the comparison is, since BGE was in development longer than Wind Waker, (or at the very least, much longer than WW's announcement) and some of its core ideas (such as those vehicles) were with it since day one in late '98. Neither Epona nor the King of Red Lions is really "like" the hovercraft—There's a focus on ungrading your craft and its abilities that isn't in the other games, and you do more things with it—Red Lions in close in its level of intergration into gameplay stuff, but still not quite. The emphasis on stealth is also quite different, even if Wind Waker did have "stealth" sections—there's a big difference between "one dungeon" and "a critical element of gameplay."

And again, puzzles are a critical element of Zelda-dom. Solve puzzles, find keys, explore the dungeon. But the puzzles in this game are much "lighter" than they are in Zelda, and the dungeons are usually very linear, which is atypical for Zelda.

They are similar, but when I first played the game, I'd been told I was in for Zelda IN SPACE. Everything I'd ever read about the game told me this. But what I found myself playing did not feel like Zelda IN SPACE, it felt like Metal Gear Snap with a touch of a driving game thrown in, with some Zeldalike dungeons. Similar, definitely. "Carbon copy," I'd say no.

Beyond Good and Evil is a lot more of a platformer and stealth game. Zelda has never been much of either aside from short sections.