The Initiative tells us more about Perfect Dark

The Game Director for Perfect Dark digs a little deeper into what we can expect.

Although rumoured beforehand, the likely biggest surprise at The Game Awards yesterday was the announcement of Perfect Dark. It is being developed by Microsoft's studio The Initiative, which was founded back in 2018.

They have been scouting top talent ever since, and their first game is Perfect Dark. But it's a reimagining of the classic series rather than a sequel, and in a new video, the developers tell us more about this. One of them is the Game Director Dan Neuburger, who says:

"There really isn't a game out there that's hitting that sort of blockbuster secret agent vision. So, when I found out that we were reinventing the franchise of Perfect Dark, I was very excited. To take something that... it's been so long since the first instalment and sort of rethink what that could be and how we bring that into the modern era is a really interesting problem to solve.

Things were very limited back when the first Perfect Dark came out. In the way they could express a secret agent, both in gameplay and in narrative. And us, without those limitations, ideas just started sparking. We wanted to create a world that people would be excited to come back to. Something that was unique and had it's own flavour. And that's sort of where we came to the idea of Eco Sci-fi.

We are leaning very heavily on, "What is a secret agent?" and there's a lot of gameplay diversity that comes into that, and we aren't shying away from that. We've been sharpening our vision of what our game is and figuring out what is going to make it unique, what's really going to make it stand out, and what's really going to make it fun.

I feel like now we actually have the horsepower to go and make this vision that we have for this game come true, and I can't wait to get it in front of players."

You can check out the video below, where The Initiative also explains how the studio came to be, what will make Perfect Dark different than other first person shooters, and how they will try to deliver a compelling story. Below the video is also two official pieces of concept art from the game.