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Nearly two years after its initial announcement during the 2020 Game Awards, the eagerly anticipated Perfect Dark reboot continues its indefinite stay in development hell as developer The Initiative allegedly continues to hit “the reset button” time and time again.
Based on a report from IGN’s Rebekah Valentine, one of the creators that had previously been working at the studio in question revealed that the trailer shown during the December 2020 event was apparently “way far ahead of anywhere the game was at.” At that point, the team “hadn’t even figured out” what their core game mechanics were and they “didn’t even know” what type of game they were supposed to be making.
The lack of vision and direction was then only made worse as numerous builds continued to be “thrown out” repeatedly, which predictably contributed to the team’s feeling that they “weren’t making any progress.” Another former The Initiative team member said “it was not that we didn’t know what we wanted, it was that we kept making things that weren’t what we wanted,” which naturally caused the studios involved to keep making the same mistakes “over and over again.”
With these revealing statements now having been made available to the public, fans of Rare’s classic science fiction series are starting to point fingers at Microsoft and their “hands-off approach” as the main cause for the reboot’s half-baked status. One Reddit user stated that this laid-back management style “can cause horrible problems when the people in charge are bad at their job or have insanely bad direction. Case in point Halo Infinite and Redfall.”
No matter whose fault it is, though, all of the parties involved will need to get their act together in order to finish creating the game. Otherwise, the Perfect Dark reboot might just end up getting stuck in development hell for an even longer period of time.
