Microsoft has been working on a reboot of the franchise for five years and is still years away from releasing it…

IGN has published a devastating article about the Perfect Dark reboot, in which The Initiative, previously billed as an elite Xbox studio, apparently couldn’t produce any meaningful work on its own (that’s what developers who have worked on bigger games before are expected to do…), because Crystal Dynamics, part of Embracer Group, is helping out with the project. IGN’s article features thirteen developers who worked on the game at three different studios!

Perfect Dark, intended to be an Xbox exclusive, is still in the earliest stages of development despite being five years since Microsoft started work on it and is still 2-3 years away from release! To top it off, the Redmond-based tech giant is planning an episodic release, but that could change depending on how much is left in development. The studio is headed by Darrell Gallagher, who was previously head of development at Activision and Square Enix before finding himself among the founders of The Initiative in 2018.

Perfect Dark last appeared in 2005 as one of the opening titles for the Xbox 360. It was Perfect Dark Zero. The new game was to be a secret agent thriller set in a world in the near future, and Microsoft officially announced the project in 2020. Certain Affinity was also working on it between 2019 and 2021, but it went nowhere, and The Initiative had a vast turnover rate over the last half-decade. Meanwhile, the studio has even switched engines, so they’re now using Unreal Engine 5 (as is The Coalition, who are using Epic Games’ technology for a new Gears).

According to IGN, it’s a story-centric FPS that combines combat with gadget espionage, but some experimental motion technology has also been mooted. In principle, development is going in the right direction. Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty gave the game a full review in May and said the days of a single studio working on a large-scale game are over. Right. Sure.

Source: VGC