Beyond Good & Evil | Why I Love
Ulf Hartelius
Thursday 6th January 2022
Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by game director Ulf Hartelius from Thunderful Development, which has just released its story-driven sci-fi exploration title The Gunk as an Xbox and PC exclusive.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about alien worlds in recent years as I've been hard at work with my colleagues at Thunderful Development building the world of The Gunk. There's one such world that's endured in my mind as a shining example of how to create a strange but believable place with characters that you care about. I'm talking about 2003's Beyond Good & Evil, one of my all-time favourite games.
As it's from a developer that's also based in Europe, I've always loved the way that its vision of another world feels like one filtered through the lens of the culture in which it's created. Its French background shines through in terrific ways, especially via the tradition of classic Franco-Belgian comics. You see it in Beyond Good & Evil's fondness for absurdity, in a pluralism that manifests in myriad characters and musical styles that nevertheless work in harmony to create a world that's unusual yet coherent.
Beyond Good & Evil takes place on an alien world, but reflects our own
It's a world that carefully balances scale and detail. A semi-open-world structure lets you wander the city with freedom, creating a sense of scale enhanced by the backstories of characters, relations, and world events that give a sense of a bigger place existing outside your field of view. Yet it also pays attention to the little things, packed as it is of nooks and
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