Three years after it was publicly announced at the 2020 Game Awards, Microsoft’s reboot of the “Perfect Dark” franchise remains “in the earliest stages” of development and is still at least 2-3 years away from release according to an extensive new report at IGN.
The outlet spoke with thirteen people who have worked on the project across three different studios to discuss its troubled development cycle and how “little meaningful progress” has been made since that cinematic trailer.
The Initiative has been working on the secret agent thriller project since its establishment in 2018. Set in a near-future world, the game will mark the first new instalment in the series since “Perfect Dark Zero” in 2005.
The outlet says the project has hit numerous roadblocks including “a fraught co-development partnership, a pandemic, technological challenges, an ongoing exodus of significant talent, and unclear direction from management”.
The former employees indicated a big part of the problem is that those in charge allegedly did not have a clear vision for the game, reportedly ignored or dismissed feedback from the team they put together, and the project underwent numerous resets as ideas were brought up, worked on, and scratched.
One source says: “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.”
Another says: “A lot of the project, if not almost all of it, ended up needing to be wholly reworked. They had done three years of work on it already, but we didn’t benefit from three years of work.”
So last year, “Perfect Dark” was essentially started over from scratch – this time using Unreal Engine 5 and with Crystal Dynamics now onboard alongside The Initiative.
Multiple sources add to the outlet that while The Initiative has been attached since the start, the newest iteration of the game, which is finally making progress, is now “more of a Crystal Dynamics game than one by The Initiative”.
