Do believe I told you so-

Now it's all out and you know! 'cause I wanted to.

I never claimed to be a wise man. Nor did I claim to be the future-struck child of destiny, imbued with the indomitable sight-of-the-future. I own not the counsel of an army of Bene Gesserit, and I am not the Kwisatz Haderach- and yet on the very day that the both the game 'Perfect Dark', and it's developer 'The Initiative' was announced, I could see the future. The cloudy grey broke and one single knife of sunlight cut down from the heavens to elucidate the point: This was going to be a mess. Even as the war drums of excitement started to beat and nostalgia bells for the revived franchise clanged, I could see the wasted land of scorned potential laying just a hair beyond the rainbow. And now, in the damnable year of our earth 2022, it seems that which was foreseen has come to pass, as it always must. But can anyone, even the initially hopeful, really look themselves dead in the reflection of the black-eyed mirror and say this was a surprise? Truly?

Because at the end of the day, what even is 'The Initiative' supposed to be? A parade of red flags mailed their expresses invitation to 'bad idea day-spa' directly to my door when the phrase 'AAAA Developer' was first put to digital type. That alone rang with the hollow reverberance of some stodgy fish-faced grey-tied stock bro, looking at the steadily rising graphs for the Games Industries profit margins and concluding "Do you know how I could make this line even steeper? By flushing more money into the projects!" To venerate a 'AAAA developer' with an 'unlimited budget', you first have to conclude that the AAA landscape has largely failed gamers, which it has, but then somehow reach a warped consensus that this is due to a lack of resources, rather than a failure to establish strong, effective teams with flexible leadership and a bright shining vision. Maybe that's because those other factors all read slightly ephemeral,  all so 'wishy washy' and qualitative. The world becomes much more simpler once you whittle down everything, even the production of art, into a numbers game; the higher the number in the input, the higher the number on the output: criminally oversimplified economics 101.

Yet still it sounds enticing, doesn't it? A development studio with it's hands on technologies that so far exceed the studios of today that they are worthy of having their own level of tiered designation. It teases the confines of our imagination and tickles our hope to dream. And whilst we're busy lost in our abstract land of imagined perfection, we fail to ask ourselves the logical and grounded questions, like: If you're being given the resources to make something never before seen in the industry, why is your first project a remake of a Golden-Eye successor game? It just feels like I'm struggling with a couple of annoying mismatched pieces whilst trying to construct the puzzling image of this sales pitch, at least from where I'm standing. But perhaps my own confessed reservations were poisoning my perception, I conceded, and as such it would prove much more prudent to hold back on judgement, see where the chips fell for this 'Initiative'. And fall they certainly have.

Brows started furrowing again not so long ago, once after what felt like an eternity of utter silence regarding the Perfect Dark Remake, reports came out that this game wasn't being solely developed by this 'Initiative' like we had been led to believe. Rather, the prototypes and ideas would be conjured in the think-tank that is 'The Initiative', whilst Crystal Dynamics would jump at the chance to make the thing as long as it took them far away from the sinking ship that is their 'Marvel's Avengers'. So 'The Initiative's blank check is going towards prototype building and subcontracting? That seems- a little bit like a let down. But hey, at least we were seeing big name developers collaborating to bring a game to life that fans seemed genuinely excited for. Perhaps these are just the baby steps for 'The Initiative' as it slowly builds up its in-team rapport and grows large enough rewrite the very concept of this thing we call 'gaming' altogether! (Oh god; that probably would have led to the development of the world's first mainstream, and by this rate also the only 'real', NFT game. Maybe what happened instead is much for the better, then.)

I'm sure you've heard the news; for it seems one curious journalist decided to peak through the windows of 'The Initiative' to see exactly what has kept them so quiet over all this time, and what they found was a company with half of its seats vacated. That's right, since it's inception and before the public has received so much as a gameplay demo walkthrough video, let alone a single game, the company appears to have lost a huge chunk of 36 people from their work force, bringing their rooster down to just under 50. That strikes me, and others with the powers of basic deduction, as more than a little odd. I mean sure, you're going to get some people who aren't down for the struggles of putting out that first game, I get it, but when you're losing over 30 in your first twelve months, with many of the departed once occupying key company positions, the question has to be asked whether or not you're doing something extremely wrong. Lead designers, Lead Artists, Lead writers have all called it quits; telling the silent story of a game eyeing up a troubled development.

In fact, at this point it's safe to say that the creative mind fuelling Perfect Dark, and indeed this company as a whole, has fundamentally changed, and that could mean any number of dubious circumstances for this burgeoning studio. Perhaps this is a leen-ing of the design team, a sensible exorcism of the fat that is causing friction within the development process and making progress difficult. (Yeah, maybe all 36 of them are just bad at working in a team.) Or maybe at least some of those 36 are slightly disillusioned at working within a team with an unlimited budget, ostensible lack of producer oversight, and yet still a crippling hitching to boring facts of the industry like 'remakes', 'conventional design paradigms' and 'forsaking the truly groundbreaking in a destructive search for massive mass appeal'. Right now we can offer naught but conjecture, this is just how I'm making sense of what we're seeing right now.

To it's credit, Microsoft aren't playing the impatient landlords according to most reports, so at the very least we can expect the Initiative to have a chance to finish whatever this game they're making now is shaping up as. Whatever mess this brave new evolution of the game design team is currently making for itself, Microsoft is currently more than happy to watch them flounder and cheer them on with gentle encouragement, which is probably for the best right now because this 'Initiative' has some serious issues with itself to work out. Key point of contention? Well hold on to your seat so that you're not knocked out of it- but apparently employees are frustrated with a development process that is going "Painfully slow." Wha- well I never could have seen that coming! It's almost as though you need more than a room full of programmers pulled from every which corner of the industry and drowning in development dollars to complete a full game. Who'd a thunk?

So if you were getting all excited for Perfect Dark and assumed this silence meant the team were getting really ingrained in the heavy development process; yeah, this is going to be some bad news. The game has probably entirely rebooted it's development, and there's a clear vacuum in leadership right now which is going to hound this game for as long as it takes for a confident head to take charge over the operations. Games like this typically end up coming out in a state that can charitably be called 'confused' as well, so don't go taking off days from work to see this 'world changing' release as unfortunate, unwitting rubes did for Cyberpunk 2077. My foreshadowing powers saw disaster before, and it's seeing it again more clearly today. The ominously named 'The Initiative' has 'doomed' written all over it.