Ubisoft released a new developer diary recently covering Beyond Good And Evil 2. The upcoming game, which heavily themes itself around diversity and multiculturalism, has been the cause of much controversy due to the depiction of some of its characters and themes, along with Ubisoft attempting to make pirates and immigrants seem friendly. Nevertheless, in the latest five minute developer diary, they attempt to clear up how the crew system will work and what gamers can expect from it.

The five minute dev doc starts with a look at the French Ubisoft team, led by Michel Ancel.

The team explains that after debuting at E3, they state that they want players to be able to board, to be able to steal, and to be able to travel to any place as far as the eye can see.

Gabrielle Shrager is still writing the game, and the team is still in the concept design phase where some elements of design are still in the white box phase of prototyping and development.

Interestingly enough, Ubisoft is taking a page out of Roberts Space Industries’ development playbook.

Instead of keeping the game under wraps for the next two years and only announce it when it’s ready for release, they’re bringin gamers along for the ride during the design and prototyping phase.

As they add more content they have plans on informing gamers about what they’re adding and why, and how it will fit into the game world. It’s, as I mentioned, identical to what Roberts Space Industries is doing with Star Citizen.

The big difference, of course, is that RSI is crowdfunded and Ubisoft is using their own capital and investor money.

As much as I’m not excited about Beyond Good and Evil 2, I will applaud Ubisoft for the open-air development process. We don’t get to see it often – most times because games media is corrupt and don’t know how to convey the information properly to their audience – but I’m grateful they decided to take this approach to the design phase of Beyond Good and Evil 2. I’m curious how well this will work out and whether or not fans will stay interested in the process?

For Star Citizen there were plenty of setbacks, but once they gutted the engine and laid down their foundation, things began picking up rather briskly. So with the engine tech done and finished, Ubisoft is bringing gamers along for the creative ride when it comes to actually building and implementing content into Beyond Good and Evil 2. It should be interesting to see how this unfolds.

So far, they’ve already received their most upvoted feedback from the gaming community in the comment section, so we’ll see if they take heed to that advice. Check it out below.