E3 2018: Beyond Good & Evil 2 Getting Content From Joseph Gordon Levitt's Company

Ubisoft has announced a bizarre Beyond Good & Evil 2 campaign with actor Joseph Gordon Levitt. As revealed during Ubisoft's E3 2018 briefing, Levitt's entertainment company HitRecord is teaming up with Ubisoft to allow anyone to create content for Ubisoft's long-awaited game. Really.

Here's how it works at a high level: Anyone can create music or images for Beyond Good & Evil 2 and upload it to HitRecord for the company's community to collaborate on. After a period of time, HitRecord will make a demo and send it to Ubisoft, which will approve it or send it back for revisions. After that, HitRecord will master the music or art and send it back to Ubisoft to go in the game. As with other HitRecord content, the creators will be paid for their work.

"I think video games are in many ways the future; in many ways much more than movies," Levitt said during a presentation attended by GameSpot this week.

All of this is happening through the Beyond Good & Evil 2 community program Space Monkeys. We'll update this post with more details on the specifics as they are announced.

Unlike the first title, Beyond Good & Evil 2 places players in the role of their own custom space pirate, who can be any race, gender, or even species--be it a human or animal hybrid. As a pirate, players will be able to navigate from planet to planet in a ship and can freely drop out at any moment to fly around in a jetpack or board enemy ships.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 is a prequel to the original. The game takes place shortly after Jade--the protagonist of the first Beyond Good & Evil--was born and is set in System 3, one of the star systems humanity traveled to after leaving Earth to build a new civilization. Ubisoft also revealed that the camera mechanic from the first game returns in the form of a spyglass, which lets players take pictures, scan the environment, and more.

The game was first formally unveiled during the publisher's press conference at last year's expo, where we had a chance to take an early look at it and felt that it was ambitious but not what we had imagined. Ubisoft hasn't yet announced a release date for Beyond Good & Evil 2, but you can sign up to participate in the Space Monkey Program at the official website.