Perfect Dark

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Entwickler: The Initiative & Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
System: PC & Xbox Series
Release: TBA

Perfect Dark will take place in a near future world that has been torn apart by ecological disasters.

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keine große überraschung, aber man sollte perfect dark nicht in naher zukunft erwarten:

Three years later, developer The Initiative is still, in many ways, only at the beginning.

At the time the trailer – created by an external CG house – was shown, it was “very obviously way far ahead of anywhere the game was at,” according to one developer who was working at The Initiative at the time. “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.”

Teasing new games with cinematic trailers years before the game itself is ready is a common practice in the industry. But The Initiative’s radio silence since combined with reports of major attrition at the studio have sparked questions about the project, exacerbated by its recent absence from Xbox’s summer games showcase. The concern is not unfounded: according to conversations with 13 sources familiar with the game’s development, little meaningful progress has been made on Perfect Dark since that 2020 trailer.

Among even more former employees we spoke to was a sense that the people in charge were unable to communicate a clear vision for the game they had so enthusiastically signed up to make. Or, some said, when they did manage to communicate that vision, leadership ignored or dismissed feedback from the experienced team they had put together. These repeated struggles over creative vision resulted, sources said, in build after build being thrown out, and internal frustration growing with each new reset.

“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 one The Initiative developer. “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.”

In early 2021, before Certain Affinity’s departure and the major development milestone, Perfect Dark design director Drew Murray left the studio to return to his former employer, Insomniac Games, as a principal designer. All our sources who were there at the time cited him as the first significant exit in what would become a veritable avalanche throughout 2021 that would nearly deplete the studio.

A tally of those who list their work at The Initiative on LinkedIn reveals 35 total departures in 2021 alone. The Initiative lost another 12 in the first three months of 2022, and LinkedIn numbers indicate the studio did not hire nearly as many new employees in the same period or even since. While these numbers are rough estimates, those who were there at the time suggest that roughly half the studio was gutted, with the total number of employees dipping down into the 30s at its lowest.

Why were so many people leaving? Largely, frustration at a perceived lack of forward momentum, exacerbated by more and more people departing. Because The Initiative had hired so many industry veterans in a competitive geographic location, many found new roles quickly and easily. Entire departments were hollowed out, and progress on Perfect Dark halted as people waited for key decision-making roles to be filled. One developer there at the time recalled "literally" doing "almost nothing for nine months,” waiting for positions to be filled and decisions on key game elements to be made.

After multiple necessary months of onboarding and discussion, the new co-development partner of Perfect Dark was handed the vertical slice that The Initiative had assembled with Certain Affinity. But according to individuals who worked at Crystal Dynamics at the time, what they received was a bit of a mess. While some sources attributed that to the chaotic relationship between Certain Affinity and The Initiative, as an added stress, The Initiative had opted to jump to Unreal Engine 5 in the interim before Crystal Dynamics came on board, adding to the amount of work needing to be done. One former Crystal Dynamics employee described what they were handed as a construction with no foundation. “A lot of the project, if not almost all of it, ended up needing to be wholly reworked,” the source said. “They had done three years of work on it already, but we didn’t benefit from three years of work.”

Which is how in 2022, nearly four years after the studio was formed, Perfect Dark was essentially started over from scratch in Unreal 5. And while the two studios did broadly seem to get along better than in the previous partnership, after a year of high attrition at The Initiative, it was hardly in a state to lead development on a massive project. Crystal Dynamics, well-staffed, began to step into missing leadership roles and take more and more ownership of the project. This once again resulted in disagreements and infighting in departments that had established leaders on The Initiative side.

und der klassiker darf natürlich nicht fehlen:

Developers from all three studios involved with Perfect Dark told me that throughout development, Xbox has been remarkably hands-off with the project – not unlike its reported attitude toward Arkane’s Redfall. One described the parent company’s involvement as simply “giving us money and letting us decide how to move forward and requesting milestone updates.”