Time Extend - Beyond Good and Evil

Edge Online is running a feature from the print version of Edge (in my opinion one of the finest gaming publications available) entitled Time Extend. This monthly feature rewinds the clock to look at a fantastic game from yesteryear. The Christmas Time Extend covers the well reviewed but underselling Beyond Good and Evil. Topical, as Michel Ancel also headed up the well reviewed console game based on Peter Jackson's King Kong. From the article: "So what was it about the adventures of an elfin lighthouse-keeper that made Jackson think Ancel could tame a two-ton gorilla? On the surface it seems a peculiar choice, but while Jade and Kong could hardly be more different, it was exactly because of what Ancel had accomplished with his heroine that Jackson was interested in the first place."

Comments

Just my two British pence

[Kazzahdrane]

Beyond Good and Evil is a great game, and it's especially great for more casual gamers. Even doing some side-adventuring, I finished the game in around 10 hours but didn't get bored for a minute. The difficulty isn't too taxing, the story kept me interested and considering I picked the game up preowned at a low price I was very happy with my purchase. I would recommend it to anyone, especially someone looking to introduce a non-gamer to gaming in a casual way.

Re:You make it sound...

[subrama6]

it was launched at the normal price, but sold so poorly, that it was dropped to the $20 range within about 6 weeks.

Re:And here I was

[Phisbut]

Having worked on the Beyond Good and Evil project at Ubisoft, I can tell you that the game was originally supposed to be a trilogy (which explains the pretty weird ending, leaving something for the sequel). What came out of development was a very good game (as the few who played it know), which has sometimes been refered to as "like Zelda, but not from Japan".

However, marketing for the game was awful, the game was barely announced, and very few people actually knew what the game was about. Therefore, the game didn't sell well *because* of bad marketing. Unfortunately, we all know how game companies know their stuff... following the BGE fiasco, the marketing dept just kept on going advertising Splinter Cell and the lead programmer from Beyond Good and Evil got demoted. Yep, you read it right: he got demoted for making a great game...

That killed the trilogy. When the first game of a serie doesn't sell well, Ubi doesn't invest in a sequel, no matter why the first didn't sell.

BGE

[MrCopilot]

Go get this game and fiish it, You won't be sorry.

I bought it for my 8 yr old daughter. Mostly non-violent and witty characters. Main objective in the game is to take photographs for a news agency. She loved it. I played right along side her taking turns (SinglePlayer Only) until we finished it.

Our review: Fun Flop.

Too bad too would make a great franchise.

Finally, someone who says the truth.

[Inoshiro]

I swear that Ubisoft paid off all the video game magazines so that they would condsider BG&E a great game.

The trouble was that BG&E was rushed out for the holiday season. In doing so, they cut off the required development time to make it a great game.

" there's no question that Ancel achieved his ambition of producing a streamlined adventure, there's nothing memorable, nothing meaty in any of the game's set pieces. It's a game you finish in a happy haze, entranced by your time in Jade's world, but hard pressed to remember a single fight, puzzle, race, or stealth challenge that stood out."

The best part I can think of is the first dungeon, because I played it twice (once at a friend's place, and once when I bought the game for 9$ CAD new).

BG&E had a lot of promise, but the execution was flawed. The game needed a couple more dungeons (it had 3 in total, plus the racing and standard side-story collections), and could've used maybe one or two more side-story things (it's a nice change from a game like FF X-2 that demands 40 hours of my life for a bare-minimum experience!). The story was very promising, but the ending could've used more work, especially letting Jade suceeed because she was determined, not because of some fate. The monsters were pretty cookie cutter, too.

It would've been nice if there was replability (hell, a simple arrange mode which moved everything around randomly after you beat it once would've been worth it).

Re:And here I was

[buffer-overflowed]

Zelda has it's stealth moments. Ocarina, sneaking up to the castle past the guards, Link to the Past has a similar sequence, in Wind Waker, it's stealthing through the fortress, etc. etc. You see a move towards some stealth starting at the SNES, and the there's pretty much at least one heavy stealth sequence per major console release after that.

BG&E was probably the best non-zelda game in the zelda genre of this console generation. It had a story less convuluted than your typical japanese RPG translation of the past, it had a ton of quirky characters, and it had an interesting setting/theme. It also had it's not quite so great characteristics, you could tell it wasn't finished for example. But all in all, it was a damn great game.

Re:And here I was

[Walkiry]

>After all, the engine for BGE was used in all of the very successful Prince of Persia sequels.

It wasn't, at least for Sands of Time (and probably the rest, but I can't say since I haven't played any of the subsequent ones). At first they used it, then they switched to some other engine developed in their Chinese studios with more muscle. From Gamespot:

In early January, the programmers realized that the JADE graphics engine was no longer capable of supporting the game's huge levels and detailed visual effects. "The programming team came in and basically said, 'Yannis, we have some bad news. We need to create a totally new rendering system for the game,'" says Mallat.

And in the next page:

As the deadlines began to approach for creating an E3 demo, the JADE rendering engine was removed from the game. It was replaced by a 3D rendering engine created by members of Ubisoft's Shanghai, China, design studio. Almost immediately the team began seeing results. The game was running faster, and, most importantly, the visuals were improving, thanks to effects like in-game fog and streams of light in the environment.

Nevertheless, I agree that it's weird they demoted the lead programmer when the game was actually pretty good. So, it didn't sell but got glowing reviews in several places and not much in the form of negativity from those people who did play it... and the one to blame is the programmer. Riiiiight.