After Gamescom, where Xbox largely focused on big-name games coming out fairly soon, it seemed like we'd be waiting quite a while for more news about some of Xbox's bigger and shrouded in mystery upcoming games. However, every now and then we get a little surprise - this was the case with Perfect Darkwhere Xbox's Matt Booty briefly talked about the hotly anticipated reboot during the PAX West panel.
Buti, who is the head of the now overgrown Xbox Game Studios portfolio of development companies and games, said that the reboot of the Perfect Dark franchise would have to be handled “very carefully,” noting that such games “don’t always age well.” And, you know, Booty is right. But the next thing he said is interesting—and, for my money, wrong.
“What I think is super cool about Perfect Dark, what’s super cool about Joanna Dark, is the fantasy of a super agent, a spy, kind of like Bourne Identity, James Bond,” Booty explained.
"It's always a cool meme that people want to jump on - but again, we have to make sure it's done in the right way, so I'll just stick to the word 'very careful'."
Wrong is probably unfair. I think everything Booty says is accurate... but that's only accurate for about half of the original Perfect Dark. Or to put it another way, Perfect Dark is a spy game, and it's ostensibly about a James Bond woman. But that's literally and figuratively only part of the story, and any reboot of the franchise must embrace the entirety of the original to capture what made it so beloved.
What I'm saying, of course, is that Pitch Dark is a little weird. This isn't just Bond or Bourne, and that's true even from the start. The opening scene of the game takes place on a futuristic flying vehicle speeding through a neon-lit futuristic city straight out of Blade Runner. Your mission is to rescue a mysterious doctor who has fallen into the clutches of an evil corporation, although when you discover the doctor, he turns out to be not a person at all, but a complex artificial intelligence encased in a kind of flying laptop. Perfect Dark is full-fledged science fiction.
It's also a damn fun game. Starting with a visit to Area 51, where you rescue a wise and funny "gray" alien named Elvis, who will later don the stars and stripes vest. Soon Perfect Dark becomes similar to Halo and GoldenEye. Agent Dark finds himself on hostile alien ships and eventually launches an attack on the hostile alien planet. Nothing is held back.
Don't get me wrong - spy stuff is a huge part of Perfect Dark. I also think the traditional espionage missions are the best in the game. The opening trio of missions at DataDyne headquarters are excellent, as is protecting your boss Carrington during an attack on his private villa. Chicago remains my favorite mission, featuring very user-friendly level design, a rain-soaked atmosphere with unforgettable music, and Joe walking around in Deckard's cape.
But still, it's all just part of a broader game, and I honestly think that a big part of what makes Perfect Dark a great game - and a better game than GoldenEye, don't bother commenting otherwise - is its breadth. It uses the spy and espionage stuff as a springboard into a bigger, crazier story - and in doing so, elevates itself beyond just being a Bond clone with a different protagonist. At the time, I suppose that was the point - Rare probably wanted to both evoke and differentiate its new hero from Bond and its work on GoldenEye - and the full-blown sci-fi setting and extraterrestrial shenanigans allowed it to do just that.
This, of course, is not all and not always. What's more important to me is that this Perfect Dark reboot isn't just some aggregation of currently popular Tomb Raider-style trends, but that it examines the structure of the original game (specifically its open-ended, but manageable, multi-objective missions) and finds a way to successfully adapt it to modern game design. The closest recent example is IO Interactive's excellent reboot of the Hitman series, which is now working on Bond, so it looks like Joanna and James' futures are still intertwined.
What we've seen so far from the new Perfect Dark is interesting. The trailer, although short and CG, clearly paints a picture of the world. The planet is devastated by terrible weather and natural disasters, and humanity is crying out for help from the very mega-corporations that probably caused these problems in the first place. We see hints of drone surveillance, glimpses of a laptop (which itself is representative of the PD's brilliant weapon firing modes), and also talk of secrets as the camera zooms through a clearly top-secret lab. So far so good.
However, this could all just be a sci-fi story from the near future and remain relatively mundane. I can easily imagine a version of this game that plays it all out in a relatively straight forward way, as a dark cautionary sci-fi tale about a combination of an ongoing slow climate apocalypse and the runaway power of corporations ironically funded by bloody Microsoft. We learn something like, shock-horror, that corporations are actively accelerating and instigating disasters in order to expand their sphere of influence, and all that. I really hope it won't be just that.
While it won't be as much of a surprise as it was in the original game, where the alien influence was really out of the ordinary, I do hope that these corporations are mining their climate change technology off-Earth, or even making secret deals with nefarious aliens behind the scenes. . This is the bullshit I want to see. This is the main part of what Perfect Dark is for me. That was pretty much missing from Zero since it was a prequel, and that was honestly one of my big issues with that game's story.
So, yes. You're right, Matt Booty - one of the cool things about Joanna Dark is the super-spy fantasy of her and her being the answer to 007. But that's only part of the appeal of Perfect Dark - and some elements may not be as sexy on paper today as they are in late nineties.
, are an important part of the series' identity. I hope they stay in the reboot.
