Okay... so Perfect Dark proved me wrong.

 

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?

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. 

The Intiative and Crystal Dynamics

 And my climbing axe!

I've not exactly been subtle about my feeling towards Microsoft's new hotbutton game studio that they've conjured up, saddled with the mysterious, yet also eye-rolling, name of 'The Initiative'. (Sounds like Nick Fury's personal development studio with a name like that) From the very second I heard it, a single eyebrow rose, and the second followed when with the cringe-worthy follow up claim that this would be the first studio ever to put out 'AAAA games'. A term which is literally meaningless and yet will hang around this studio like a bad stink until, as I've predicted many a time, the group dissolve over many of the complications coming their way that seem inevitable. The premise of a game development studio with a bottomless pool of funds seems like a literal invite to waste money, and if Microsoft think that by doing this they'll unlock some heretofore undiscovered new layer of quality lying dormant inside the bowels of the earth for all these years- I have to admit that I don't share their enthusiasms. But hey, at least Perfect Dark is getting a sequel after most of the world has forgotten about it. Yay.

Things have gone utterly dark (you might say perfectly dark) regarding how this company has been getting along in their mission since their announcement to the world, which is either a very good sign or a very bad one. Mayhaps this team have stuck their nose to the grindstone and are busy pumping out simply delirious quantities of code and content, fuelled by a blank cheque, or maybe they're having troubling at an administration level and haven't conjured up anything worth talking about yet. All we can say for sure on this matter is that the recent Nvidia leak going into all of the 18k titles that have used Nvidia services or wishes to release to Nvidia support in the next 2 years, The Imitative were on the list for an apparently 'untitled game', which feasibly could be Perfect Dark, but maybe it isn't and we're looking at the start of overlapping projects already. So as I said, either they're in charge of their resources enough that they can take on a second game, or bad management is just starting to show as their splitting focus before their first game even has a release window. There really is no in-between with an idea like the Initiative, and Microsoft don't want there to be. It's their 'hail Mary' proposition, their one way to get that leg up over Sony.

In that sense it shouldn't be much of a surprise at all that Crystal Dynamics, creator of the Tomb Raider games and most commonly seen with their paymasters over in Square Enix, have partnered with The Initiative in order to further work on Joanna Dark's return. (Oh great, even more people in the development chain? What could possibly go wrong...) But seriously, this is going to be the first major new project we've heard out of Crystal since their time on The Avengers, which doesn't paint the best possible picture of what this new game might look like. Square Enix's Avengers, a game which notoriously turned people off by playing things too close to the chest, and then lumped a highly questionable (and by that point cliché) business model that bled into poor sales and worse retention. (One speculation claimed that the initial release lost around 60 million for Square Enix.) Yep, sounds like the sort of crack-team I'd want working on the debut to the biggest development team gamble I've ever done!

To be fair, I actually do respect the team over a Crystal Dynamics a whole lot, and though I maintain (and will continue to maintain) that The Avengers was a misbegotten mess of an idea that shot itself squarely in the foot before it ever had a chance to make it in the real world, that doesn't take away from the other projects the group has bought out. Tomb Raider's revival is a prime example of this studio at it's best, and an example that these guys are experienced in taking a pre-established female-led franchise and rewriting it from a modern, grounded and exciting, perspective. And they were also behind the 'Gex: The Gecko' games. So that's got to count for something right? (Right?) I don't hate the idea of these teams joining hands in matrimony, I'm more just sitting in foreboding of what might happen when The Initiative drag Crystal Dynamics down with them for yet another spectacular failure.

But then why am I so pessimistic to this venture? Beyond my usually playful exaggerated tone, I seem to find it genuinely unfeasible that things are going to work out for Microsoft here and I'm struggling to put a finger on why that is. I mean I've actually played the original Perfect Dark (albeit the remastered version) and can therefore insist that it was a heck of a lot of fun for a stagebased first person shooter style game. Sure, personally I happened to enjoy Star Wars Dark Forces a heck of a lot more, but I think there's room enough for a reimagining wormed in this game somewhere. Maybe a turn to how you approach the game which more aligns with the 'spy' elements of this alleged spy game. Heck, I would absolutely flip my lid if the teams went to the natural conclusion and made this upcoming game an incredibly high production immersive sim. But somehow I'm just not that confident.

I think it's because in the back of my mind, beyond the source material and the talents of those on the cutting room floor, I'm thinking of the big entity sitting on a pile of money behind them and thinking "What are you doing?" A bigger example of 'putting all your eggs into one basket', could not exist, as I guess Microsoft want to surpass the 'crack teams' over at Sony. What Playstation have managed to build up over the past generation, a team of talented AAA straight-shooters who put out exclusive banger after banger, is the dream of all console manufactures, but in my head I feel like it works because there are so many studios putting out these games at a rate that is consistent and varied in offering. (Not too varied, mind you. These are all adventure games.) Microsoft dabbled in the same, luring countless small companies under it's banner, but the results in the five years since they started this shift in direction, has been underwhelming. The most they've got is an exclusivity deal with Bethesda, which is big, but those two companies were heading that direction anyway; what else does Microsoft have up it's sleeve?

To be devil's advocate, maybe the exact thing that Microsoft need is someway to be competitive to Sony that hasn't been tried before. Maybe something that only someone with tech billionaire money could pull off. And is that something sticking a bunch of newbies in an office block and then slowly drowning that skyscraper in money? Well that doesn't sound right, but it might be. Mechanically, it tracks that the more resources you give a product the better that final product will be, which is why I understand that some might find my scepticism utterly bewildering. But you try and apply that very same logic to something as intangible as an artform, your results aren't ever quite as consistent. A lot of the best works of art out there, especially in the world of gaming, are made under the pressure of constraints, in tools, time, team and money, and when you go the other end of the spectrum the results can often be muddy and unpolished. (Like Anthem.) Maybe I see The Initiative as the ultimate final boss of art excess, which is why I can't fathom anything worthy coming of it all. Although that doesn't mean I don't want it to.

AAAA games, whatever that means, might just be everything that Xbox and it's supporters have needed to justify the existence of that console. Something with the scope and scale to achieve anything, (and with the right leadership to reign it all in and sharpen a golden vision from that chaos) might just be the future of premium priced games. I'm just not going to hold my breath on it, especially given that the debut title of this venture is a remake. I mean, doesn't that just sound odd? A fresh new venture, trying something that's never been tried before, and they're stuck making a remake to a cult classic Rare game? (Maybe that choice symbolises the team's dedication to grounding limitations, despite infinite resources, in order to focus the team. I don't know.) With any luck everything will work out and I'll come away with some serious egg-on-my-face, and it that happens then that'll be some crow I will happily chow down on.

   

Perfectly Dark

As all things should be

I didn't know that 'the Avengers' were into game development now! At least that's the impression I get when I hear of a new studio with a name as cold and detached as 'The Initiative' dawning upon us. But this marks the very first project from a relatively new Microsoft-formed studio that promises to launch a new breed of videogame that has been described as 'AAAA', apparently. Now, honestly I'm really bummed that I'm only hearing about these guys now because looking back and seeing the ways in which Microsoft promised the absolute moon from this studio, I'm just fascinated by how handily these guys are being set up for failure. I mean just listen to this; apparently the term 'AAAA' was coined by Microsoft in order to refer to the studio working on games that surpass the scope and development means that we've seen out of the AAA market so far. Can't you just taste the 'doomed' in that mission statement? The AAA landscape is littered with overbloated and overfunded projects that choke on themselves due to any number of reasons relating to the size and expectations welling all around them. Almost every single one of their number has seriously disappointed in some regard, whether that be for poor vision, terrible execution or lack of clarity. (Or serious overpromises in the optimisation department; Cyberpunk) So how do you solve that problem? Throw more money at it, of course!

It just makes me smirk and cringe at the same time, to think back to the days of Destiny and the 500 million which went into forging a game that was only really worth half of retail price in terms of content. I mean don't get me wrong, Destiny's first person combat slapped harder than any other FPS ever made and that's a hill I'll fall down on, but somehow I don't think that 500 million was needed to intricately craft each individual microaction of the player's joystick. And yet if you hear Microsoft talk about it, they think there's a whole new tier of videogame waiting to be unlocked by the right team of the developers with a Caribbean-island's load of money and a name as ominous and non-descript as possible. (I wonder if they'll be officially published by 'The Corporation' and hand off PR to 'The Organisation'?) To that end they certainly secured the talent, most notably being huge alumni from Bungie and Crystal Dynamics. But will this be enough to make Microsoft's vision come true? Almost certainly no, but in this cynical world fuelled by hatred; at least there'll be an entertaining show.

Thus it was confusing when the very first we hear out of the mouth of 'The Initiative' was as big a turn off as one could feasible imagine hearing in their lifetime. 'Eco sci-fi'. I mean just what the heck is that supposed to mean? Are we going 'Fern Gully' up in here, is this another 'The greatest threat was man!' story? And then they went onto clarify that they're talking about a sci-fi world on the brink of ecological disaster. (Way to hit a little too close to home, guys) Also, why exactly does that need the term 'Eco Sci-fi' to be coined at all? That makes it sound like there's something new or innovative at work here, but the way they describe it the story just sort of resembles the exact same thing that Final Fantasy 7 was going for. (Which is really awkward seeing as how that game just got a remake and it was present at the very same game awards show right next to this game's announcement.) So I think it's safe to say that, just like with the zombie game, I didn't start off on the best foot with this game. (Which wasn't helped by the developers attempt at acting for the intro. I appreciate the attempt, but I also don't appreciate it and please stop.)

And so we saw a trailer of pure cinematics which I'm not going to reactively pop-off about considering the fact that the studio itself is literally two years old and this game is absolutely in such early development that it's still an embryo. In fact, even seeing this trailer probably qualifies all of us to apply for the position of 'Oracle of Delphi', because we're seeing further into the future than ever before, and I don't mean that in an excited way. (I'll be surprised if we hear anything more about this game in the next 3 years.) Myself, I found the trailer rather dry and uninteresting for a good length of it's running time, to the tune of me yawning myself silly through the drone shots roaming the futuristic city. In fact, all I really remember thinking was "is that a gun turret? Doesn't seem very 'ecologically friendly' to me. I'd go so far as to call that a betrayal of vision." In fact, I was so checked out that I didn't even notice the logo atop the building, nor the voice over man with his generic-as-heck dialogue refer to the only human we see in the trailer by her instantly recognisable name. But I did sure-as-floods-in-English-summer do a double take when I saw that title card.

Perfect Dark. My lord, how long has it been? And just like many out there I immediately thought of but one thing when I saw that; "I guess Microsoft really did nick all those licenses when they took control of Rare all those years back. That's pretty rough for them, buddy." But seriously, I have to admit that whilst I didn't exactly explode with mirth at this reveal, I did get a little excited. Perfect Dark was a truly exceptional first person shooter back in it's day that still holds up in the gameplay department. It bought the best in FPS gameplay before there was a standardised equation to the formula and so sort of played like a better version of 'Goldeneye'. (Yeah I said it. 'Perfect Dark' is better!) It was pretty challenging too, but so much fun to master; and I'm told the sequel is like the franchise's 'Invisible War', thus not worth playing. But then I learnt about the pomp surrounding 'The Initiative' and I couldn't help but find the whole thing ridiculous again.

This 'super power' studio who are going to set 'new horizons for big budget video games' started off their very first project with a remake; way to hit the ground running, guys! Okay, so maybe this isn't as much a 'remake' as it is a 'reimagining'. (If that makes anyone more interested in the project.) An interview after the matter clarified that whilst this borrows the name and basic premise of Joanna Dark's first adventure, the game will very much be a brand new thing. Does that give it enough room for the story to blossom out from it's 'Deus Ex lite' thing it had going on in the original? Who knows. (No one's mentioned anything about Aliens just yet...) At the very least it means that people who played and loved the original, à la moi, can lie to themselves that this is a sequel because honestly there was nothing about the original narrative to get too attached to anyway. Consider me tentatively interested.

Now it may seem for a minute that I'm being a bit disparaging to this studio on their very first game, and I absolutely am. But given their mission statement, the ludicrously big corporation backing them up and the fact that they're advertising their studio as a place for veterans to flock to; I don't really feel like I'm punching down. Though that being said, let me clarify that I don't mean the team or their game ill-will, I just expect failure from everyone now that CDPR betrayed me. I rolled my eyes when I heard these people talk about their passion in this studio built for 'mega blockbusters' first, but I still would definitely like to see what a Perfect Dark for the modern age looks like. Heck, a new stealth-based action game with high quality developers behind it? That's totally up my alley, so of course I'm down. I'm just worried that maybe the team might not be all there, considering the obvious monetisation-driven compromises this studio is going to be subject to alongside the fact that their marketing team seems to have messed up the web page that's supposed to explain more about the game only 3 days after going live. (Pretty amateur move for the world's first AAAA studio...)

With Metal Gear dead, Deus Ex probably soon following suit and Ghost Recon firmly in the dog house- I need a new stealth-based game to set my passions alight and so based on that selfish desire alone I'm willing to route for this 'Perfect Dark'. Does that mean I believe in the studio behind it and their apparent vision to make the 'biggest games ever'? No. And I also don't understand how this insanely big budget team landed on making a stealth title for their debut, those tend to be pretty niche. (Then again, I'm merely assuming it'll be stealthy because that makes sense given the context. The original actually had a lot more loud action to it, so this may be nothing like I expect it to be.) But even if this 'Initiative' only manages to churn out one game before Microsoft realises that it's too unsustainable and scales things down, I'm glad it's this one.