The revelation that Beyond Good and Evil 2 is a real video game that's being actively developed was one of the most exciting announcements at E3, but the trailer shown at Ubisoft's pre-show conference raised more mysteries than it solved. At an office space in LA, where I met the creative team from Ubisoft Montpellier and saw an early tech demo from the game, many but certainly not all of my questions surrounding it were answered.

Comprising an entire galaxy that will have a consistent level of detail and believable physics regardless of whether you're chatting with a character in a downtown noodle shop, roaming the streets of a city, in orbit over a planet or racing through the cosmos, to say this game is ambitious is an understatement.

Beyond Good and Evil is 2003 game with a cult following, centred around the adventures of photojournalist and revolution leader Jade in the year 2435. Humans have colonised many planets around the galaxy, and live alongside human-animal hybrids.

This new game takes place "several generations" before the first, in a time where humans are just getting started with their expansion. Hybrids exist, but rather than being free citizens they're produced by humans for the purposes of slave labour.

The game's narrative director Gabrielle Shrager says it's a world rife for adventure. "[The game takes place] at the centre of interstellar trade, and so when we have this very multicultural mix of humans and this huge slave class you know what we get: a new golden era of piracy".

Players will begin the game dreaming of escaping their low-caste life, Shrager says, and will eventually become a pirate captain with their very own ship and crew. Marking a big departure from the previous game, many characters you meet in the game will be generated by the game on the fly and unique to each player's experience.

The protagonist character can be designed by the player, but crew members will be recruited from the many characters you meet across the game world, which will vary hugely in appearance, background, culture and abilities. There will be some static characters, like the game's villain and the people that give the crew quests, but for the most part each player will meet different people with different personalities and behaviours.

The game's senior producer Guillaume Brunier points to beautiful paintings and illustrations plastering the walls of the room, many of which show various crews including one made up entirely of Asian women, one with a fearsome-looking tiger hybrid and one with an older-looking woman as captain. One of the crews even features a human piloting a mech. 

Most of the pictures show locations and vehicles, with Brunier explaining that the team has a very concrete idea of how the game will look and feel, even if it won't actually get there for months or even years.

One of the illustrations shows the cramped, dirty noodle bar from the trailer, while another shows a massive spaceship orbiting a planet. Brunier says their game will be able to shift between these very different scales effortlessly and without loading, with the same level of graphical detail throughout. The studio has had to build a bespoke game engine called Voyager, which literally simulates the galaxy that the story takes place in, to achieve this trick. Players will be able to move from cramped interiors of buildings, to exploring cities, to traversing planets, to blasting off through space, Brunier says.

While we talk, a hyperactive Michel Ancel — creative director of the game and creator of some of Ubisoft's most iconic franchises including Rayman, the Rabbids and the original Beyond Good and Evil — fiddles with a controller in front a screen that shows the team's game engine in action.

"Now it's my turn to talk!" he exclaims as we sit down, bouncing with excitement.

On the screen a spaceship hovers in front of a massive statue of Ganesha, with a city visible below. This is your character's home and mode of travel between planets, Ancel says, but it is also used as a garage. The front of the ship opens and a smaller, more agile ship flies out. Ancel zooms in so this new ship now appears as big as a house, and the larger ship seems absolutely massive.

After flying the ship around for a bit, Ancel zooms right into it to show Knox, the monkey from the trailer, standing inside. Activating a jetpack he flies out of the ship and over to the Ganesha, showing that the statue is actually made up of individual brushed metal panels held together by big circular rivets. The whole thing isn't exactly pretty ("don't pay attention to the graphics, they're placeholder", Ancel says more than once), but it is extremely impressive. All of the zooming and character movement is completely smooth, with no loading or texture pop-in.

Ancel zooms right out so that it appears as though we're viewing the planet from low orbit. "Let me just change the time of day", he says, as the sun moves overhead and disappears behind the globe, creating a sunset and plunging one side of the world into darkness. With the lights off it's possible to see golden glowing clusters along certain points of the continent, which Ancel says are all cities filled with streets and buildings to explore, characters to meet and adventures to be had.

Once the player has a capable ship they'll be able to travel anywhere at any time. Ancel says to think of the narrative structure like that of the latest Zelda: there is a story present but the game won't push you towards it, and there'll be plenty to see and do no matter where you go. He was keen to point out that this is not a galaxy of unlimited, randomly made planets and systems à la No Man's Sky. The planets and cities have all been crafted by human hands.

Getting the game to its current state has taken "three years of very intense work", Ancel says, but it's clear the idea has been in the works much longer than that.

When asked exactly how long he has spent trying to bring his vision to reality, Ancel gives a sigh and says, "I have a feeling I have been working on this game my whole life".

The original Beyond Good and Evil was first shown to the public 15 years ago, with Ancel saying he hoped it would be part of an ongoing series that let players explore an entire universe with absolute freedom. While that game was subsequently scaled back and significantly altered before release, Ancel has talked on and off about a sequel ever since.

This new game described by the team and glimpsed in the tech demo and artwork very much evokes the original premise of the first Beyond Good and Evil, and seems intended to define a universe that subsequent games — as well as the original itself — will sit within.

The sheer amount of moving parts that will be involved in this project is staggering, from a simulation that controls a galaxy and all its suns, planets and cities to the fact that the developers plan to let players invite friends into their crews for online play. But then the confidence, passion and enthusiasm of the creative team is staggering too.

It remains to be seen if the vision for this ambitious game is ultimately scaled back again, or if it will ever even be released as a finished product, but if it can be executed to plan Beyond Good and Evil 2 will change the face of role-playing and adventure games.

The author travelled to Los Angeles as a guest of Ubisoft.