This is crazy, this should have been such an easy win for them. That IGN article is fascinating.
Studio leadership was fairly clear from early on that The Initiative’s Perfect Dark would see a balance of combat and espionage elements that would ideally feel like playing through a James Bond or Mission: Impossible film – the developers just had to figure out how to translate those memorable movie moments into video game format.
But while these core ideas remained roughly consistent throughout Perfect Dark’s development, exactly what the player would be doing to express them kept changing as ideas were pitched, prototyped, and then scrapped for something completely different over and over again. This process was expected at first, as a fairly normal component of game development. But as Perfect Dark moved into its second and third year, sources tell us that this process began to drag on much longer than expected, as leadership’s refusal to commit to any specific ideas or shape for the game began to frustrate both teams.
Everything here sounds wrong. "Playing through a film" is a garbage game design concept that would never come from an established game designer. It has no relevance to anything in the modern game industry. It sounds like a game pitch from 2005. Look, you have other successful spy games to crib from, you have a successful gameplay heritage from Perfect Dark 64... the game design pitch should relate entirely to that. Something concrete, that everyone involved in modern gaming immediately understands.
Like
-The game is a first person shooting game with minor stealth and dialogue interactions set in a near-future sci-fi world
-In later levels Joanna receives or can obtain a unique sci-fi spy gadget with gameplay effects - this is the unique gameplay hook. Can be mind-control, xray specs, time reversal... possibilities are endless. Let your gameplay and level designers design.
-Levels are broadly open and have multiple objectives which increase with difficulty, but some levels will be more open-linear and combat focused
-Level design should be similar in design to Hitman: World of Assassination, but does not necessarily need to have that level of complexity in NPC routines, but rather the number of different routes to an objective and "stylish sense of place" should be the focus
-Online interactions will be mostly based around daily leaderboard runs to complete unique objectives at high difficulties to unlock skins or weapons etc because there is no sense in trying to compete with the big beasts of online shooters (like Apex or Fortnite) with a game like this.
Or, to give you the above in one sentence: A first-person spy game with level design and objectives similar to Hitman: World of Assassination but with unique sci-fi gadgets and weapons. There. Every hardcore gamer would immediately know what they're getting with that.
Okay, actually developing that is harder than it sounds, but the concept? 3 years to figure something out? Come on, man.
Also, unpopular opinion but once the team started bailing in 2021 (after three years of no progress) and there was so little top talent left that some lower level workers did nothing for 9 months - that was the point to pull the plug. There's no coming back from a team self-imploding like that. Even the people you hire at that point probably aren't going to be good enough to turn it around because top talent will avoid what is known as a trashfire.
It all sounds like there's no one guy saying "Do this like this." It's endless managers who don't have the authority to just make a call and go with something. Teams need a single creative leader. Seems like too many of these MS studios just don't have one.
www.resetera.com
If you could schedule a custom match with friends, the fun was there. Even the progenitor of matchmaking, Halo, ended up bringing back custom game browsers in The Master Chief Collection.
