Continued tales of troubled development mean the Perfect Dark reboot is still nowhere close to being finished.
Microsoft’s latest gaming showcase was certainly far more exciting than the , in part because it used many of the same marketing techniques as Sony.
However, despite a healthy mix of established titles and intriguing new reveals, there were notable absences; chief among them being the .
It’s been nearly three years since that initial teaser and after zero official updates and , it turns out that the game is still two to three years away from release. So, if we’re lucky, it’ll be out in 2025.
Honestly, even that seems fairly generous, as the same sources say that very little progress has been made on Perfect Dark since that 2020 announcement, with a shift to Unreal Engine 5 in 2022 basically starting the project again from scratch.
Speaking with , former employees also reveal that before was brought on to assist, developer The Initiative already had help from another outside studio: Certain Affinity, the same studio which contributes to the multiplayer modes for the Halo games.
Despite a relatively smooth start, plans kept changing, with ideas being pitched and prototyped before being discarded for entirely new ones – a process that dragged into Perfect Dark’s third year of development.
Former employees from The Initiative talk of poor communication from leadership which, combined with feedback being dismissed or ignored, led to a general sense of frustration.
‘It was not that we didn’t know what we wanted, it was that we kept making things that weren’t what we wanted,’ says one source. ‘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.’
Tensions and a lack of communication between the two studios eventually led to them opting not to renew their partnership in 2021, which was actually a relief for both parties. However, this left Perfect Dark short-staffed, and this was before the mass departures.
Perfect Dark is far from the only major Xbox title that Microsoft seems to be struggling with. Everwild, State Of Decay 3, and Contraband remain MIA, with none of them getting mentioned at all during the recent showcase.
has similarly struggled with development troubles, with developers allegedly not even sure what sort of game they were making.
Meanwhile, was accused of toxic working conditions which were allowed to fester thanks to Microsoft’s hands-off approach to how its studios operate.
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