Perfect Dark is still years away due to internal development problems

A logo. That’s what we have almost three years after the announcement of Perfect Dark at The Game Awards 2020, and everything points to the fact that it will still take some time to see something tangible from the game, as its development is far from smooth. This is what is revealed in an article published on IGN, which highlights problems in the development of this reboot and discrepancies between The Initiative, the studio in charge, and Certain Affinity, who is collaborating in the development.

We start from the assumption that at the time of the reveal trailer, the game was more than undeveloped, it completely lacked an initial idea. “We hadn’t even figured out any of our core game mechanics. We didn’t even really know what type of game we were making,” said a member of The Initiative, now out of the studio, like so many others, which has suffered a significant employee exodus over the years.

His absence during the successive events in which Microsoft was present has a very clear explanation. Since then, according to 13 anonymous sources involved in the project, there has been virtually no progress in the development of the game. The problems cited are multiple: a tense relationship between the studios involved in the game, technological challenges, the pandemic, the departure of key talent and a direction that has never been clear. For this reason, and despite the involvement of Crystal Dynamics, Perfect Dark is currently “in the earliest stages.”

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Who is really in charge?

Some of this internal tension stems from the arrival of Crystal Dynamics, because when the creators of the last Tomb Raider trilogy joined the process, there was already a studio helping out: Certain Afiinity, which is also working on Halo. We were set up in a way where no one at the remote studio reported to anyone at our studio,” said a former member of The Initiative. “Only the top level of management had any established accountability relationship.”

“It was not that we didn’t know what we wanted, it was that we kept making things that weren’t what we wanted,” said a source from The Initiative. “We’d do it over and over again. The…levels we had when I left weren’t the same ones we’d had three months prior, or three months prior [to that]. I don’t know why people just kept hitting the reset button. That was definitely contributing to that feeling that we weren’t making any progress. People kept starting over.”

Then would come the staff disbanding, with no less than 35 leaving The Initiative in 2021 alone, and another 12 leaving the studio in the first three months of 2022, bringing the team down to less than 30. Why did this happen? One of the sources reveals that they spent “almost nothing for nine months” while waiting for some key positions to be filled or key elements of the game to be completed.

And in the meantime, what was the attitude of Xbox? According to them, the company has limited itself to “giving us money and letting us decide how to move forward and requesting milestone updates,” after Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, confirmed that last May he had an update on how the development was going.

The “good” news is that today it seems that the development of Perfect Dark is on track, with about “two or three years” left for its release. It is also reassuring to know that they seem to be clear about its playable approach, being an action and espionage FPS with a great importance of the gadgets that Joanna Dark will have at her disposal.

Source | IGN