Believe it or not but it’s been nearly three years since the reboot of Perfect Dark was announced. Since then we’ve heard next to nothing about the project in regards to any sort of update. IGN has reported that they have reached out to at least 13 different sources familiar with the development, all of whom confirm that the game remains in pre-development phase despite being announced almost three years ago. What follows in the report are various accounts of a troubling and arduous development cycle, most of which is due to the studio’s internal strife, as well as Xbox being “too hands off.”

IGN spoke with 13 people about ‘Perfect Dark’

The game is still “in the earliest stages” of development, at least 2-3 years away.

Certain Affinity was the first co-development studio before they left the project in 2021.https://t.co/eUuUUs1qA4 pic.twitter.com/cM2rEU7Au6

— Knoebel (@Knoebelbroet) June 26, 2023

According to IGN’s sources, the Perfect Dark reboot is still at least “2-3 years away” from being readily available. The report also mentions that the project was potentially heading towards an episodic format, similar to how Telltale released their titles, and the original iteration of the 2016 Hitman title. The sources claim that the development was hampered due to an initial co-developmental partnership between The Initiative and Certain Affinity from 2019 and 2021. Apparently at some point, both studios were at odds with each other, which only decreased the overall progression of the project.

What also didn’t help was around the same time The Initiative lost more than half of their working staff within the span of 12 months. This spurred the leadership at Xbox to reach out to Crystal Dynamics in 2021 to partner with The Initiative and assist with development, which essentially restarted the project from scratch. “I blame The Initiative,” one of the former employees said. “I don’t blame our development partners. We chose not to hold anyone accountable to the vision, and we just let people keep trying things.” The employee goes on to say that the upper management continued to change and deter from the original idea that the team would come up with, making the overall creative process slow to a crawl.

As for the “hands off” approach, IGN actually brought this point up to none other than Xbox Studios Head Matt Booty earlier this month shortly after their Xbox Games Showcase 2023. Booty responded to this idea in jest, saying that he and many others have actually gone to The Initiative directly to assist. “I will just chuckle a little bit at the ‘hands-off,’” he said. “The amount of time I’ve spent on the phone with Darrell and everybody at that studio is sort of the opposite of hands-off, and the amount we’ve been down there.”

The hands-off term came into the minds of the video game community during the launch of one of the more anticipated titles of 2023; Redfall. The release ended up being a total disaster. The title was highly criticized for the bland story, gameplay design, and the plethora of technical problems that plagued players across all platforms. It was later revealed that the developer, Arkane Studios, lost more than 70% of their Prey development team during the production process. Around the same time, it was unveiled that Microsoft, the overarching parent company of the Xbox Games Studios umbrella, was “hands off” during most of the development.

Despite all of this, Booty ensured IGN that he was still looking forward to the reboot of Perfect Dark, adding that he had a “full review” of the title back in May. The full takeaway from this report is that video game development in 2023, and beyond, is only getting harder, and this project exemplifies this situation. Hopefully Initiative and Crystal Dynamics have something to show us in the foreseeable future, otherwise, this might just go the way of Duke Nukem Forever, and no one wants that to happen.