Behind Gamescom, where Xbox is largely focused on well-known titles coming out soon, it looks like we’ll be waiting a long time for further updates on some of Xbox’s bigger, more mysterious upcoming titles.However, every now and then we get a little surprise – that’s how it is perfect darknessin which Xbox’s Matt Booty briefly talks about the highly anticipated reboot on a PAX West panel.
Booty, who is the head of the spread now Xbox Game Studios The development company and the game’s portfolio, talked about how rebooting the Perfect Dark franchise had to be handled “very carefully,” noting that properties such as these “don’t always age well.” And, you know, Booty was right. But what he said next was weird – and for my money, it was wrong.
“I think Perfect Dark is super cool, Joanna Dark is super cool is super-agent fantasy, spies, that Bourne identity, that James Bond kind of thing,” Bootie explained.
“It’s always been a cool meme that people want to know about – but again, we have to make sure it’s in the right way, so I’ll stick to ‘very careful’.”
Mistakes can be unfair. I think everything Booty says is accurate…but it’s only about half as accurate as the original Perfect Dark. Or, to put it another way – Perfect Dark is a spy game ostensibly about a female James Bond. But that’s only part of the story, literally and figuratively, any rebooted franchise needs to include all the originals to lead to what made it so popular.
Of course, I’m talking about Perfect Dark being a little weird. Not just Bond or Bourne, even from the beginning. The game’s opening cutscene takes place on a futuristic flying transport from Blade Runner through a neon-lit futuristic city. Your mission is to rescue a mysterious doctor controlled by an evil corporation – although when you find the doctor, he’s not human at all, but a complex artificial intelligence housed in some sort of flying laptop. Perfect Darkness is complete science fiction.
It’s also a hellish camp. Start with a visit to Area 51, where you rescue Elvis, a clever “grey”-style alien – who later dons a Stars and Stripes vest. Soon, Perfect Dark felt the same aura as GoldenEye, and Agent Dark found himself aboard a hostile alien ship and eventually launched an attack on the hostile alien home. Nothing stopped.
Don’t get me wrong – spy stuff is a big part of perfect darkness. I also think the traditional spy-driven missions are the best in the game. The opening trio of the DataDyne HQ mission is excellent, as is protecting your boss Carrington while raiding his private villa. Chicago remains my favorite, featuring a highly usable level design, thick rain-soaked atmosphere, and unforgettable music, and Joe sneaking around in a Deckard cosplay trench coat.
But still, all of this is just part of a wider game, and most of what I really attribute to Perfect Darkness as a great game is its breadth. It uses spies and espionage as a springboard into a wider, crazier story — and in doing so doesn’t just elevate itself as a Bond clone with a different thread. At the time, I thought that was the point – Rare probably wanted to evoke their new hero and differentiate it from Bond and their work on GoldenEye – and the full-fat sci-fi setting and alien shenanigans allowed it to Make it happen.
Obviously, that’s not all, all. What’s more important to me is that the Perfect Dark reboot isn’t just some sort of Tomb Raider-esque aggregation of current trends, but it examines the structure of the original game (especially its open-ended but size-controllable multi-objective tasks) and find a way to successfully adapt it to modern game design. The closest touchstone of late has been IO Interactive’s excellent Hitman reboot series, and apparently — and the studio now finds itself working on Bond — so it looks like the futures of Joanna and James are still intertwined.
What we’ve seen so far with the new Perfect Dark is interesting. Although the trailer is CG and short, it shows a clear state of the world. The planet has been ravaged by terrible weather and natural disasters, and humanity is now calling for help from the giant corporations that may have caused these problems in the first place. We saw signs of drone surveillance, we glimpsed a laptop gun (which itself represents PD’s excellent weapon alt-fire mode), and people talked about secrets as the cameras passed through an apparently top-secret laboratory. So far, so good.
Still, all of this may just be a recent sci-fi tale and still be relatively solid. I can easily see a version of this game relatively straightforward as a dark cautionary sci-fi tale about an ongoing combination of slow-burning climate apocalypse and the uncontrolled power of the company, ironically, provided by the bloody Microsoft funds. We’ll find things like that, shock horror, corpses actively speeding up and instigating disaster to expand their reach, and so on. However, I really hope it’s more than that.
While this wouldn’t be as surprising as in the original game, the alien influence does come from the left field, but I really hope these companies are digging their climate change solutions technology from beyond Earth, or even hatching in Go behind the scenes to make secret deals with evil aliens. This is the schlock I want to see. This is a core part of Perfect Darkness for me. Since it’s a prequel, it’s largely lost from zero, which is honestly one of my bigger problems with the game’s story.
So yes. You’re right, Matt Booty – one of the coolest things about Joanna Dark is the super spy fantasy about it all, and about her as an answer to 007.But that’s only part of the appeal of the perfect dark – and some camping elements, although on paper may not be as sexy today as it was in the late nineties
IES, is an important part of the identity of the series. I hope they keep restarting.
