Ubisoft hit a home run Monday with its latest trailer of the long-awaited game Beyond Good and Evil 2, stoking the already red-hot enthusiasm for the title.
In addition, the publisher, which has been talking about its commitment to its player community for years now, is now inviting fans to help create the game they’ve been requesting for more than 15 years.
Ubisoft and Hit RECord, a crowd-sourcing entertainment company headed by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, have teamed up to enlist fans to help create everything from art to music for the game, the company announced at its pre-E3 press conference.
“[This] isn’t just to post and promote something you’ve made on your own,” said Gordon-Levitt. “The point is to collaborate. It’s not a contest. We’re going to really be making songs together—and the same goes with the visual aspects we’re going to create.”
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is the sequel to a 2003 game that wasn’t a huge seller, but cultivated a cult following. The game followed Jade, an investigative journalist and martial artist, who worked with resistance fighters to reveal a planet-wide alien conspiracy. (Jade made her reappearance in a new trailer Ubisoft revealed Monday.)
With Hit RECord, Ubisoft is asking fans to help supply art assets and music, among other game elements. These will be featured in the game and people who supply components of the game elements will be paid, both companies said.
This is the first time the company has worked on a video game.
“I think video games are in many ways the future, much more than movies,” said Gordon-Levitt.
Rather than letting fans simply upload art or songs and be done with it, Hit RECord takes elements it finds especially strong (say, the bass line of a musical submission) and asks its community to build on that. The result is a truly collaborative piece of content.
“Right from the start, we knew we wanted to involve our community in unprecedented ways,” said Michel Ancel, creative director of Beyond Good and Evil 2. “HitRECord is the perfect partner to collaborate with to create this expansive world by bringing our passionate communities together and bring it to life.”