Rayman Legends Retold swaps 2D art for 3D and rebuilds the world between levels

Ubisoft is remaking Rayman Legends as Rayman Legends Retold, ditching the original's hand-drawn UbiArt Framework look for full 3D animation running on the Snowdrop engine. The project is a collaboration between Ubisoft Montpellier — the original developers, who more recently made Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown — and Ubisoft Milan, the team behind the Mario + Rabbids series.

The level layouts themselves are largely untouched; the original stages were imported directly into Snowdrop, with all-new assets built on top of the same geometry. The real work is happening between levels. In the original, each world was accessed through a bare gallery corridor with picture-frame portals, which production director Alessandro Arndt Mucchi describes bluntly: "It's a bit all over the place. There's a rich world there which we felt needed a new touch, because you don't really make sense of what's going on in the Glade of Dreams." Now every world is a proper hub environment — Toad Story's swamp becomes Stinkbog, a living space you navigate by wall-jumping between trees and riding wind gusts, with toad camps visible in the background and level music drifting through the air as you approach each portal.

Retold also adds a new level type: dragon ride sections that play like Starfox filtered through How To Train Your Dragon. You guide a fire-breathing mount through obstacle gauntlets, barrel-rolling to dodge hazards and blasting barriers with fireballs. Animation director Marco Renso says these sections exist to give bosses more "space" and make them "feel a little bit more present." In Stinkbog's dragon ride, for instance, you spot the world's giant toad boss off to the side, finally getting a bath — smaller toads scrubbing his armpits with mops, a look of pure bliss on his face. Then you come tearing through the camp, torching vines and shattering barricades, and he bolts off-screen in a panic wearing nothing but a loincloth, with a towel rack and set of armour waiting on the path ahead.

The Rock Paper Shotgun preview notes the writer went in skeptical about the 3D switch but came away convinced Ubisoft might actually know what they're doing. No release date for Rayman Legends Retold has been confirmed yet.