Ubisoft announces Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition – WGB, Home of AWESOME Reviews

UPDATE: Following its accidental release on Xbox, and even being playable via Ubisoft+, the French developer/publisher has officially announced the existence of Beyond Good & Evil 20th Aniversary Edition. Not much more was said except that details will be shared in 2024, which is odd because the 20th anniversary of Beyond Good & Evil’s release was November 11th of this year,

Original Story: Well, someone is in some serious trouble over at Ubisoft after they accidentally released an unannounced Beyond Good & Evil remaster titled Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition. The game briefly appeared on the Xbox storefront, and Ubisoft+ subscribers also reported it being downloadable and playable.

Naturally, Ubisoft scrambled to get the listing taken down and to copyright claim any footage uploaded to Youtube, including a 30-minute look at the game. But this is the Internet and attempting to erase things is like shutting the gate to a field after the bull has fucked off and is busy decimating the local pottery shops.

Xbox Achievement tracking sites also noticed that the game’s Achievement had popped up.

The listing described the new version of the game as having “4K, 60 fps with improved graphics, controls, and audio, along with brand-new autosave and cross-save features,”

It also mentioned brand-new content: “Discover more about Jade’s past in a new treasure hunt throughout Hillys,”

I won’t link to the footage that was taken of the game since Ubisoft is hastily scrubbing it all anyway, but it looked reasonable. It’s not a ground-up remake or anything like that but the uprezzing of the graphics looks quite nice, especially when you consider that the game is 20 years old. A couple of screenshots doing the rounds look rough, though. However, those could just be people trying to find deliberately unflattering shots.

Although it has never been officially announced, we’ve known about the existence of some kind of Beyond Good & Evil remaster for a while now. A couple of months ago the ESRB – the US rating board – put up a listing for the game, revealing that it was going to launch on PS4, PS5, Switch, PC and Xbox. Despite this, Ubisoft has remained completely silent on the project.

They also remain mostly silent on the sequel, only occasionally letting people know that they are totally, 100%, absolutely still working on it. It was teased waaaaaaay back in 2008 and then properly announced in 2017. At this point, even the most die-hard fans are beginning to doubt if the sequel will ever be released.

Going back to the Anniversary edition, surely Ubisoft will actually admit its real now. It would be quite hilarious if they didn’t, though.