Is Star Wars: Outlaws Beyond Good and Evil 2 in Disguise?

(I posted this in r/VideoGames meaning to post it here. I left it there for conversations sake.)

I‘d recently been thinking how odd it was that out of nowhere Ubisoft of all companies would be putting out a Star Wars game so quickly after announcing it. One with seemingly so much overlap with their own supposedly already in development game...

1. Both are ambitious, story-driven sci-fi games
2. You pilot ships to other planets
3. The art direction and gameplay are suspiciously similar.
4. The announcement-to-release for Outlaws was quick coming from Ubisoft.
5. The timeline matches up:

• 2017: BGE2 was announced
• 2020: Michel Ancel quits Ubisoft
• 2023 (June): Star Wars: Outlaws gets announced
• 2024 (August): Star Wars: Outlaws release date

It would be easy for Ubisoft to take the skeleton of BGE2 and pivot it to Star Wars after Ancel’s departure. I bet they saw how good those Star Wars: Jedi games did, approached Disney, slapped a half-finished game in front of them and said “this would make a sweet Star Wars game”.

Boom.

Ubisoft gets money to fund the remaining development and recoup some much needed cash they’ve already sunk into the game. They also get use of the Star Wars brand to push the end product out to a massive established fan base.

Given their recent track record (Skull and Bones, BGE2 in dev hell, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time delay…) they need some wins and this would be a big one.

What made me think up this theory was being at a GameStop today I noticed out of the corner of my eye a promotional poster for Outlaws and mistakenly thought it was promotional material for BGE2 until I took a closer look.

Afterthought: It could be they used parts of BGE2 to build Outlaws, to test features and see what people like, then go back to BGE2 with the feedback. That’d be smart. Not unheard of… Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise is basically a combat test run for XVI.