The art of discovery is a difficult thing – and in our current industry, most publishers prefer pre-made CGI-filled trailers or captured gameplay footage. However, I’ve always preferred a different approach: a linear series of events that show what’s possible in the game. This style was memorably used to reveal Metal Gear Solid 2, along with titles like Halo 2, Doom 3, The Last of Us and Killzone: Shadow Fall. It’s designed to showcase the gameplay vision of a title contained in a single location – a way to help the player understand what kind of game the developer is building. With the Perfect Dark reboot finally revealed during this year’s Xbox Expo, I was excited to see a return to the format.
There’s no doubt that directing Perfect Dark has been fraught with challenges. First announced six years ago in a simple teaser, the studio went silent after that, with rumors suggesting it was in rough shape. With this new trailer, however, it finally looks like we have a vision of what the team wants to achieve. This is still a vertical piece – it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that little else of the game’s campaign has yet to be built – but this trailer gives me hope that they’re on the right track.
Creating a new entry in the Perfect Dark series is perhaps not as simple as it may seem. At first glance, the original Perfect Dark is a type of shooter that mostly doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s mission and objective driven, filled with gear and other unique scenarios, but the core mechanics, level design and flow are very much of the era. There’s a contemporary game, known as Agent 64, that builds on this style of gameplay perfectly – the demo is great and a fun throwback – but it’s not necessarily what you’d want from a full reboot.
Instead, The Initiative has chosen to build a game that integrates elements of immersive sims with first-person parkour, not unlike Mirror’s Edge. While we don’t know the scope of the game yet, this trailer does suggest that players will have options on how to tackle a stage. In this case, it’s an infiltration mission which means some freedom in how you reach your objective.
A few things that piqued my interest. First, the game uses full body awareness, allowing you to see Johanna’s arms, legs and torso as she performs actions – something that adds to the immersion in these types of games. We also see things like different viewing modes and a voice recorder, hinting that the devices will return, as you’d hope. The question here is whether there are alternative solutions – for example, she uses the voice recorder to bypass a gateway at one point, while a proper immersion sim (“im-sim”) might allow alternative methods of infiltration.
Later in the segment, they showed a fight between Johanna and multiple enemies. I appreciate the exploding fruit and the beautiful dust from an exploding fire extinguisher, and I really hope we see more interactives like this. Of course, since this demo is mostly focused on this point, I’m also curious what their plans are for enemy behavior – that’s a big part of any similar game. If the enemy is too sensitive or not sensitive enough, it can break everyone.
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Another key element that they got right in this trailer is the weapons themselves and how they are presented. You’ll pretty much spend the entire game looking at weapons or tools in your hands, and I like what they’ve done here so far. The pistol in particular has a shiny texture that feels like a nod to the original, but with the technological benefits you’d expect from a modern game.
The key here is that while there’s still a lot we don’t know, what’s here is promising and pleasing to the eye. I like the direction they’re going – and that goes for the technology that powers the game, at least based on our initial look.
First, despite the inclusion of Crystal Dynamics, this game was built using Unreal Engine 5. I’m disappointed that we’re not seeing an evolution of Crystal’s excellent internal technology, but, nevertheless, what we have so far looks good .
It is not clear if this demo was created on PC or an Xbox. While PC is more likely, due to the ease of building video assets, something about the image quality and performance characteristics gave me pause. Specifically, while it’s hard to tell with compressed video, the number of pixels I was able to fill came in at 1440p or slightly higher. Furthermore, the frame rate in this trailer is NO stable – which may also be true for a PC build given how early this is in development, but it’s not clear. Either way, I’m not here to judge any of these elements – after all it’s purely academic at this point, but it looks like what’s here could work on console hardware.
The game also appears to be using the full suite of Unreal Engine 5 techniques. What appears to be Lumen can be spied by rich indirect lighting in areas such as darkened alleyways early in the trailer or corridors later on. You can really make out the typical RTGI (ray-traced global illumination) noise here too. This appears to be Lumen’s software path, rather than the hardware path, as we see some common artifacts for using screen space information that SDF-based reflections add. However, this is not unexpected for a 60fps title, and the game still looks good.
We also noticed the use of virtual shadow maps, allowing super fine detail to be rendered in the shadows, including the fine detail of the grass towards the end of the trailer.
That said, as I was going through the footage, I noticed a few curiosities that I could unearth – and again, this isn’t commentary on the final game. Essentially, the scene that helped make the pixel count possible has a flash that reveals both edges unisolated ~1440p AND more detailed loss than we would expect from that resolution. This suggests, like many other 60fps Unreal Engine 5 games on console, we’re actually looking at more of an internal 720p to 960p resolution that’s upscaled to 1440p.
The same flash also reveals that dynamic lights like this don’t currently cast shadows. This isn’t a huge deal for this particular scene, but it’s curious – and as a fan of muzzle flash shadows, I’d like to see additional dynamic lights that cast shadows.
Of course, given the length of the actual gameplay in the trailer, there’s not much more to glean at the moment – although I will mention that I’m a huge fan of the sound they’ve created so far, with the voice acting and music having potential big.
Overall, I’m glad the game actually exists and they’ve found a coherent vision for it. Given the lack of an announced release date, I suspect we’ll be waiting a long time before Perfect Dark is ready. When that day comes, though, you can bet we’ll be there with coverage, as this is one of the games I’m most curious about from Microsoft’s upcoming lineup.