After over 30 years in the gaming industry, Beyond Good and Evil 2 project lead Michel Ancel has decided to leave gaming. He'll be focusing on helping wildlife and educating people about the natural world from now on.
What will Michel Ancel do after leaving gaming?
This news comes via Ancel's official Instagram account. He posted a video of a cunning fox stealing a plastic bag behind his head as he looks at the camera jovially. In the description accompanying the post, Ancel says he's decided to stop working on video games and "focus on my second passion: wildlife". He'll be starting a "new project" in the form of an open wildlife sanctuary dedicated to education, nature lovers, and wild animals.
What does this mean for Beyond Good and Evil 2?
In regards to Beyond Good and Evil 2 and Wild, both of which Ancel was working on prior to his departure, he tells fans not to worry. The teams for both projects are "autonomous", according to Ancel, and are able to work on the games without his input. Progress on both projects is going "super well", with "beautiful new things" coming soon for the two games. We'll have to wait and see exactly what form those things take.
As well as Ancel's words, Ubisoft has issued a statement regarding the ongoing development of Beyond Good and Evil 2. The studio says Ancel "hasn't been directly involved in" the game for some time now. Ubisoft says the dev team "recently passed an important internal milestone" in development, with a new build that offers several hours of gameplay and a seamless "online sandbox". In addition, Ubisoft says it wants to show off what it's created "sometime next year" after the next internal production milestone has been passed. You can read the full statement right here.
What is Michel Ancel's history in gaming?
Ancel first joined Ubisoft as a graphic artist when he was 17. His directorial debut was the classic 1995 platformer Rayman, and Ancel would go on to be heavily involved with many other instalments in that franchise. He also directed 2003's cult classic Beyond Good and Evil and the 2005 video game adaptation of director Peter Jackson's King Kong movie.
In 2015, Ancel formed an independent gaming studio called Wild Sheep. He remained at Ubisoft as a contributor to Beyond Good and Evil 2 while his new studio began development on an ambitious survival game called Wild. Since its announcement in 2014, scant details about Wild have been available, but with this new update from Ancel claiming that work on the game is going well, perhaps it might see the light of day soon after all.
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