In the leadup to the Xbox conference I made a few predictions about what we would be seeing, and I'm proud to say I only got one of them horrendously wrong- the other two were only mostly wrong! I thought we would get a hail-mary years-too-early announcement for an interim Fallout project being developed by a studio in order to capitalise off the last few dying embers of hype from the show- and instead we got Gears 0... (Yay?) I also figured we would get a commitment to hardware from Xbox considering with everything that has happened over the past few weeks it has really felt like this is their last generation- so I expected an announcement of some brand new console, or maybe a tease of the next generation. We got a half-hearted full digital Series X which spits in the face of all their jabbering about 'game preservation' and a slight sneeze about a next generation 'at some point'. And lastly, I predicted we'd finally see Perfect Dark again, and it would be such an insubstantial teaser with the slightest huff of gameplay that we'd be disappointed, and it wouldn't have a release date. (2/3 ain't bad.)
Perfect Dark is the debut game of 'The Initiative', the supposedly vastly funded AAAA studio (yes, that term was coined before Ubisoft said it. Of course it is, those gibbering buffoons can't even grift in an original fashion.) which went 'perfectly dark' years ago after announcing this game and no one had seen hide nor hair of them since. I speculated that the team had died mysteriously, but unlike when I said the same about Team Cherry I might have been a little off pace. Instead it would seem that 'The Initiative', an idea I think most knew was doomed from the start, (blank cheques rarely equal better art) had been wrapped in a turbine of development hell from whence there was seemingly no escape. That was part of the reason I expected absolutely nothing at all- we'd heard so many members of the original team had bailed- I assumed this project would get a reboot because Xbox would be far too embarrassed to cancel the thing. I was very wrong.
When that logo came up during the conference I braced myself for the trainwreck trailer and... I sat up straight the moment we saw actual gameplay. I can't say whether or not it was intentional, but having the first thing we see be a near-futuristic train station immediately drew a parallel to the very first gameplay footage of the last Cyberpunkian immersive sim we had- 'Deus Ex: Mankind Divided'. Us stealth fans have wept in the absence of our core franchises, and Deus Ex's hiatus has stung the most often and fully. I want to be the super ordinately powerful solider throwing all manner of cool gadgets and insane gizmos in order to run circles around heavy security checkpoints! Perfect Dark was never really about that, being the predecessor to Golden Eye it was more of a spy-themed 'shoot 'em up'. This gameplay looked nothing like the original game to be honest- and I couldn't be happier!
In my wildest dreams I imagined what Perfect Dark could have been in it's best possible showing. I imagined a fantastic looking Immersive Sim with creative world design and complex layouts. What I didn't imagine was mirror's edge style parkour- blasting the exploration vertical wide open! Nor did I expect gun-fu style first person gameplay making the close quarters engagements look like something out of a high-budget action movie! What I'm trying to say is- Perfect Dark looked better than what I whimsically theorized it could have been on it's best day! The Initiative may have crumbled out of the gate, but they put together a dream game for me on their way to dust- and it has no release date... bugger.
That strange looking woman they've got cosplaying Joanna (they couldn't even match her hair colour, really?) seems to be every bit as resourceful as the original if not more so- recording the voices of a conversation in a crowd in order to use that one as a voice activate lock is such a uniquely interesting gameplay concept- I wonder if that is purely contextual or if they went the Metal Gear route of having that kind of system be nearly fully dynamic. Like playing a voice down an alley to draw attention from guards- that's the kind of gameplay interactions which blow stealth games past the basic set-up tools that Ubisoft always develop for their games- and then call them 'stealth friendly'.
And I simply must extol how simply gorgeous the game looks! I was expecting some form of stylised character design choices but no- they really seem to be making this a high fidelity looker- with the exception of perhaps some later action sections that seem to veer a bit more into the cartoonish, but in the effort of expanding the range of crazy-cool action moves Joanna is feasibly able of pulling off. Even the little touches in the heat of action sell the game- from the way that balcony crumbles when a shot-guard collapses on it, puffs of strategically blasted extinguisher smoke, that snazzy AR vision that gives beyond-wall vision; everything tells me that I was wrong to ever doubt The Initiative... or was I?
Because you see- despite spending all the money and goodwill trying to make this game on their lonesome- Perfect Dark has been half-surrendered to Crystal Dynamics to help bring it life, which is why they share developer credits. And given that team has just finished with the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy (and Marvel's Avengers) they're a proven enough commodity to push through development of a title like this. So are we really looking at a AAAA swanswong game developed by an XBOX birthed studio? Not really. But then again, do I really care about the circumstances of it's conception when this is a title that is, you know, literally everything I could ever ask for out of entertainment?
Immersive Sims are an incredibly difficult style of game to create, which is probably why we see so few of the buggers. CDPR thought they could make an entire open world game into one through Cyberpunk- but that turned out to be a tragic miscalculation. Perfect Dark seems cognizant of it's ambitions and simply wants to stun- and with everything I've seen so far I not only think it will, I know I'm going to play it as soon as the thing hits shelves. Or theoretical shelves, with how 'full digital' Xbox is heading. I just can't believe after all this time we still have no damned release date- good god, why show us the promised land if we cannot enter?
No comments:
Post a Comment