A remaster of Beyond Good & Evil that’s aimed at celebrating the game’s 20th anniversary has leaked and was even playable for a brief time ahead of its official reveal.
Ubisoft first released Beyond Good & Evil in November 2003, and the ambitious action-adventure game quickly became a cult classic. The series is a bit more infamous for what happened after that. A sequel was first teased in 2008 and then rerevealed in 2017, but it has faced lots of development issues and still does not seem closer to release more than 15 years after its initial reveal. Ubisoft and Netflix also announced that they were working together on a film based on the game in 2020, but we have not heard anything more about that since. This series is more famed for what hasn’t been released than what has been, so it feels quite shocking and notable when a remaster of Beyond Good & Evil leaks like this.
We first got an inkling that a remaster was coming when an ESRB rating for Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition was spotted in September. That listing was eventually taken down, but the game suffered an even worse leak on November 28. That day, a Microsoft Store listing for the game appeared, as spotted by Wario64. It featured screenshots and game details, including how the game now runs at 4K and 60 frames per second, and that it has a speedrun mode and has an anniversary gallery. According to PC Gamer, the situation got even messier as players could even access and play the game on Xbox, with some posting gameplay videos of the remaster.
Ubisoft has since gotten the Microsoft Store page and YouTube videos taken down but has since confirmed the game’s existence. In a series of tweets on X, the official Beyond Good & Evil account confirmed the remaster’s existence, clarified that the playable version of the game that leaked was a mistake and “not indicative of the final game,” and that we will learn more closer to the game’s launch in early 2024.
While this situation is messy, at the very least, we now know the long wait for Beyond Good & Evil 2 will be a little less painful as a remaster of the original is imminent.
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