We've been waiting multiple years now for news about Xbox and The Initiative's reboot of Perfect Dark, and unfortunately it seems like we could be waiting a lot longer, with the game not set to release until at least 2025.
This is according to a new report from IGN, which goes into significant detail about the history of the game's development and how it really struggled from around 2019 until 2022. Here's a brief excerpt:
"The project has seen roadblock after roadblock, with problems such as a fraught co-development partnership, a pandemic, technological challenges, an ongoing exodus of significant talent, and unclear direction from management keeping the game in development limbo."
There's a lot to unpack here, but essentially it sounds like the original co-partnership with Halo studio Certain Affinity presented some "challenges" on both sides, there were obvious issues doing the pandemic as well, and struggles over the game's creative vision also resulted in a lot of builds being thrown out.
Crystal Dynamics ended up joining the project in 2021, and following a decision to switch to Unreal Engine 5, it was apparently determined that the project needed to be "essentially started over from scratch".
Slow but effective progress was apparently made last year, and the game now has "stronger foundations" than ever but still has "a long way to go". It sounds like we'll be waiting until around 2025 or 2026 until it finally launches.
"All my sources with recent knowledge of its status say it’s still in pre-production, roughly two to three years away from release."
It's been a rough ride for Perfect Dark and Xbox's new studio The Initiative so far, but hopefully the game is finally now on the right path — we'll keep our fingers crossed that we'll be playing it in just a couple of years' time!