Don't Expect To Play The New Perfect Dark Any Time Soon

The Perfect Dark reboot revealed at The Game Awards 2020 represented the first new entry in the series in more than a decade, but it's apparently going to be a while before we play it. According to a new IGN report, the game remains in very early stages at The Initiative, the studio created specifically for the project, with "little meaningful progress" notched in the intervening years.

The report, which cites a number of anonymous employees at The Initiative, states that the studio had yet to even figure out the game's core mechanic when the trailer was revealed. Since then, the project has hit a number of roadblocks, with the pandemic, uncertain direction from management, and an inability to retain key talent all playing a part in these struggles. The game's former co-developer Certain Affinity departed from the project in 2021, which also affected proceedings.

“It was not that we didn’t know what we wanted, it was that we kept making things that weren’t what we wanted,” one The Initiative developer told IGN. “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.”

Sources say that the game will likely need at least two to three more years before it's ready for release. The reboot's new co-developer, Crystal Dynamics, is said not to be impacted by upcoming layoffs at its owner Embracer. This report comes as the blockbuster Xbox-Activision Blizzard continues to grind through regulatory processes.