Perfect Dark Reboot: Xbox Boss Gives A New Update

A new Perfect Dark game was announced in December 2020, but since then, developer The Initiative has gone through a turbulent period that saw the studio lose several of its more senior staff members. Since then, the developer has been slowly rebuilding while dealing with the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, as Xbox Studios boss Matt Booty explained in a recent episode of Friends Per Second (which also features GameSpot's Lucy James).

"I think one of the most difficult things of the last few years has been filing a big game on the scale of a Halo or a Battlefield during the conditions that we had. Number two has got to be starting up a new studio," Booty said, explaining how The Initiative has gone through an employee reboot as of late. "Number two has got to be starting up a new studio. You don't have the shared history, you don't have the people that have worked together for five and ten years. We were doing a lot of of experimenting with remote and hybrid, how we could attract talent, some of it worked, some of it didn't. It has been less leadership changes and more just the work of building a studio. It's a brand new studio."

Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics (and one of the latest acquisitions of Embracer Group) is also helping out on Perfect Dark alongside The Initiative, with Booty describing the partnership as co-development and not outsourcing.

"They are an equal partner in the development," Booty said, while talking about how partnerships like this could become more commonplace in the future. "It's not a case of Crystal Dynamics has taken over or that they're replacing [The Initiative]. We had a hundred and some people become available, who have this great pedigree of working on Tomb Raider. They're available, they're excited about working on Perfect Dark. It's really a part of how you build a game team these days as opposed to some sign that we're trying to compensate for something."

While Perfect Dark is a long way off still, Microsoft appears to have a more loaded schedule lined up for 2023. Microsoft's head of gaming Phil Spencer recently spoke about how 2022 had been a mostly quiet year for Xbox and first-party game releases, but explained that Microsoft's studios had a number of games on track for release next year after dealing with production challenges due to the effects of the pandemic. Arkane's vampire-hunting game Redfall and Bethesda's cosmic adventure Starfield are expected to be Microsoft's big blockbuster game launches in 2023.