A developer who labored on Microsoft's now-cancelled Perfect Dark reboot has addressed the declare that final yr's gameplay demo was "fake," and mentioned the glimpse was a vertical slice of the venture operating "in-engine."
Perfect Dark was one of a number of tasks canned by Microsoft this week as half of the corporate's latest devastating cuts to Xbox workers and video games. Developed by The Initiative, a studio Microsoft is now shutting down, alongside Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics, Perfect Dark had not often been glimpsed since its initial announcement back in 2020.
That all modified final yr when a "gameplay reveal" video aired as half of the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2024. And it's this video that has since sparked questions over how a lot of what it reveals corresponds to precise, working game programs.
Earlier this week, Kotaku author Ethan Gach posted on social media that he had been advised final yr's demo had been "basically fake." The query of the gameplay demo's legitimacy was discussed in more element by former Perfect Dark developer Adam McDonald, who now works as a senior game designer at Cuphead maker Studio MDHR.
"It is actually in-engine," McDonald mentioned. "I was one of three level designers that worked on it. It worked best if you played it the way the person playing in the video plays it, but it still worked even if you didn't hit the marks perfectly.
"There's some faux stuff in it," he continued, "and the actual gameplay programs proven off labored juuust enough to look good on this video. We have been quickly making actual design selections in order to not knowingly mislead gamers about what the game might be. The parkour is all actual, the hacking/deception is generally actual.
"The combat is 'real' in that someone had to really do all that stuff in the video, but it's set up to be played exactly that way and didn't play well if you played it a different way."
What McDonald is saying then, is that there's nuance right here. Like many vertical slices meant to showcase a venture that's nonetheless in growth, it was made to work simply enough, and to offer a sense of how the ultimate game would have appeared, had the venture survived till launch.
McDonald's suggestion right here appears to be that the crew behind it meant to show one thing that gave as correct a sense of what Perfect Dark could be as was attainable. That mentioned, some parts clearly nonetheless sound like they have been a work-in-progress, even when they have been meant to be consultant.
"I'm seeing big controversy over 'THIS WHOLE THING WAS FAKE' and it's annoying me, so I wanted to say something," McDonald concluded. Then, in a reply to a different person, McDonald mentioned "it was a pretty typical vertical slice" and "I don't think we were particularly deceptive with it."
He added: "It's probably more real than you think. We were figuring stuff out on the fly in time to include it in the demo, doing our best not to 'lie' to players. There's some fakery but quite a lot of it was legit."
After the cancellation of Perfect Dark, Rare's long-awaited Everwild, an MMO from Bethesda's The Older Scrolls Online crew and cuts to different tasks, it's believed that each game featured at the Xbox Games Showcase presentation in June this yr will proceed on. But what concerning the others? We've tracked down every major upcoming Xbox game we know about to check in on their status.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can attain Tom at [email protected] or discover him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social