Nothing1234
Banned
At the time the trailer – created by an external CG house – was shown, it was “very obviously way far ahead of anywhere the game was at,” according to one developer who was working at The Initiative at the time. “We hadn’t even figured out any of our core game mechanics. We didn’t even really know what type of game we were making.”
Among even more former employees we spoke to was a sense that the people in charge were unable to communicate a clear vision for the game they had so enthusiastically signed up to make. Or, some said, when they did manage to communicate that vision, leadership ignored or dismissed feedback from the experienced team they had put together. These repeated struggles over creative vision resulted, sources said, in build after build being thrown out, and internal frustration growing with each new reset.
“It was not that we didn’t know what we wanted, it was that we kept making things that weren’t what we wanted,” said one The Initiative developer. “We’d do it over and over again. The…levels we had when I left weren’t the same ones we’d had three months prior, or three months prior [to that]. I don’t know why people just kept hitting the reset button. That was definitely contributing to that feeling that we weren’t making any progress. People kept starting over.”
Which is how in 2022, nearly four years after the studio was formed, Perfect Dark was essentially started over from scratch in Unreal 5. And while the two studios did broadly seem to get along better than in the previous partnership, after a year of high attrition at The Initiative, it was hardly in a state to lead development on a massive project. Crystal Dynamics, well-staffed, began to step into missing leadership roles and take more and more ownership of the project. This once again resulted in disagreements and infighting in departments that had established leaders on The Initiative side.
Xbox’s Perfect Dark Reboot Is Still Years Away - IGN
While a new partnership with Crystal Dynamics appears to finally be bearing fruit, multiple sources who have worked on The Initiative's Perfect Dark reboot recently say that the game is still “in the earliest stages” of development, estimating that it is still roughly two to three years away...
www.ign.com
TLDR -
Certain Affinity were planned to be the co dev before Crystal Dynamics.
The CG trailer was shown before any concept of the game was greed.
Drew Murray going back to Insomniac was seen as the first major exit.
Moving to Unreal 5 added more workload for Crystal Dynamics.
Xbox is "remarkably" hands off with the project.
Game still in pre production.
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