Staff at Ubisoft's Beyond Good and Evil 2 studio are reportedly at breaking point

pcgamer.com:

Since its first trailer in 2008, Beyond Good and Evil 2 hasn't been able to catch a break. That doesn't look like it's going to let up anytime soon: Reports suggest that Ubisoft Montpellier, the studio behind the game, is under investigation by its local government for an «unprecedented» amount of burnout and sick leave among staff, and it's lost its managing director, too.

The news comes via three anonymous sources spoken to by Kotaku(opens in new tab), who said that the studio faced an investigation by the Inspection du Travail (France's Labour Inspection body) after a year in which numerous staff—including several lead devs—took extended absences from the company due to sickness and stress, some of them eventually leaving altogether. The source said that a third-party has now been given the task of interviewing Ubisoft Montpellier employees to assess their physical and mental health.

I've reached out to Ubisoft Montpellier to ask about these reports, and I'll update this piece if I hear back.

BG&E2 isn't the only game that Ubisoft Montpellier has worked on in the last few years, with the studio being credited on a few mobile games as well as Ghost Recon: Breakpoint and Wildlands. Beyond Good and Evil 2 is probably its most notable ongoing project, though and it's undergone multiple shakeups recently. In August last year, around the same time it beat Duke Nukem Forever's record(opens in new tab) for longest development time, the project picked up Sarah Arellano as its new lead writer(opens in new tab). And now staff have reportedly been told that managing director Guillaume Carmona won't be returning to Ubisoft after a long period of absence that began at the start of this year. The game is also said to have lost its