A new report claims that the upcoming Perfect Dark Reboot launch will still be years away due to numerous circumstances.
Way back at The Game Awards 2020, Xbox officially revealed that one of their new studios The Initiative was working on: Perfect Dark Reboot. The cinematic trailer lasted two minutes which vaguely gave the premise of the game. Then it led to that famous screenshot where Joanna Dark stands up and watches in the distance. “This is only the beginning,” she says.
After three years, the development of Perfect Dark Reboot is still at the start.
Perfect Dark Reboot Devs Had No Idea What They Were Making
It was revealed that at the time the trailer was shown, it was “very obviously way far ahead of anywhere the game was at,” said one of the developers 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.”
Unlucky Roadblocks
According to the report, the reason the game’s development is still in the early stages is due to the many realities of game development. It has unluckily met the same roadblock after roadblock with many problems like the pandemic, co-development partnerships, technological challenges, an ongoing exodus of significant talent, and unclear direction from management. These reasons are what keep the game in development limbo. Even though The Initiative is getting help with its new partnership Crystal Dynamics, multiple sources confirm that the game is still in the earliest stages of development and it is estimated that it will still need roughly two to three years before it launches.
Reset After 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.”
It seems Perfect Dark Reboot will still be years away from release and possibly double the amount that was estimated. Expectations are way too high for this game and it will definitely take more than just 2-3 years to make this happen.