The art of reveal is a difficult business – and in our current industry, most publishers prefer trailers packed with pre-rendered CGI or snippets captured in-game. However, I have always preferred a different approach: a linear series of events that shows what is possible in the game. This style was memorably used to unveil Metal Gear Solid 2, along with titles like Halo 2, Doom 3, The Last of Us and Killzone: Shadow Fall. It is designed to showcase the gameplay vision of a title in one location – a way to help the player understand what kind of game the developer is building. With the Perfect Dark reboot finally showing up at this year’s Xbox showcase, I was thrilled to see a return to this format.
There’s little doubt that the lead-up to Perfect Dark was full of challenges. First mentioned six years ago in a simple teaser, the studio subsequently went radio silent, with rumors suggesting the studio was in poor condition. However, with this new trailer, it finally feels like we have a vision for what the team wants to achieve. This is still a vertical cut – it wouldn’t be surprising to hear that little of the game’s campaign has been built yet – but this trailer gives me hope that they’re on the right track.
Creating a new entry in the Perfect Dark series may not be as easy as it seems. On the surface, the original Perfect Dark is a kind of shooter that’s largely extinct. It’s mission and objective driven, filled with gadgets and other unique scenarios, but the central mechanics, level design and flow are still very much up to date. There’s one contemporary game, known as Agent 64, that builds on this playstyle perfectly – the demo is excellent and a fun throwback – but that’s not necessarily what you’d expect from a full reboot.
Instead, The Initiative has opted to build a game that integrates elements of immersive sims with first-person parkour, similar to Mirror’s Edge. While we don’t know the scope of the game yet, this trailer really suggests that players will have options in how they handle a stage. In this case, it’s an infiltration mission that involves some freedom in how you achieve your objective.
Some things that caught my interest. Firstly, the game uses full body awareness, allowing you to see Johanna’s arms, legs and torso as you perform actions – something that increases immersion in these types of games. We also see things like different vision modes and the voice recorder, which suggests that gadgets are returning, as you’d hope. The question here is whether there are alternative solutions – for example, she uses the voice recorder to bypass a gate at some point, while a true immersive SIM (“im-SIM”) could allow for alternative infiltration methods.
Later in the segment they showed a skirmish between Johanna and numerous enemies. I appreciate the fruit being destroyed and the beautiful powder released by an exploding fire extinguisher, and I really hope we see more interactions like this. Of course, since this demo has mainly focused on stealth so far, I’m also curious to see what their plans are regarding enemy behavior – this is a big part of any similar game. If the enemy is too sensitive or not sensitive enough, he can destroy the whole thing.
Manage cookie settings
Another important element that they have nailed in this trailer is the weapons themselves and the way they are presented. You spend more or less the entire game looking at the weapons or tools you have in your hands, and I like what they’ve done here so far. The gun in particular has a glossy texture that feels like a nod to the original, yet with the technical benefits you’d expect from a modern game.
The key here is that while there is still a lot we don’t know, what is here is promising and seems spicy to me. I like the direction they’re going – and so does the technology powering the game, at least based on our first impressions.
First off, despite Crystal Dynamics’ involvement, this game was built using Unreal Engine 5. I’m disappointed that we don’t see an evolution of Crystal’s excellent internal technology, but still, what we have so far looks good.
It is also not clear whether this demo was made on PC or on an Xbox. While PC is the most likely, due to the ease of building the video assets, something about the image quality and performance features made me hesitate. While it’s hard to tell with a compressed video feed, the number of pixels I was able to complete came in at 1440p or slightly higher. Additionally, the frame rate in this trailer not stable – which could also apply to a PC build, given how early in development this is, but it’s not clear. Anyway, I’m not here to pass judgment on any of these elements – it’s ultimately just academic at this point, but it seems like what’s here could potentially run on console hardware.
The game also appears to make use of the full suite of Unreal Engine 5 techniques. What looks like Lumen can be spied through the rich indirect lighting in areas such as the darkened alleys early in the caravan or later in the corridors. You can indeed also observe typical RTGI noise (ray-traced global lighting) here. This appears to be Lumen’s software path, rather than the hardware path, as we see some artifacts common when using screen space information that magnify the SDF-based reflections. Still, that’s not unexpected for a 60fps title, and the game still looks good.
We also noticed the use of virtual shadow maps, which allows super-fine details to be shown in the shadows, including the fine grass details at the end of the trailer.
That said, as I scrolled through the footage I noticed a few curiosities to nitpick – and again, this isn’t a commentary on the final game. Basically, the scene that made pixel counting possible has a flash that reveals both unaliased ~1440p edges And more loss of detail than we would expect from that resolution. That suggests that, like many other 60fps Unreal Engine 5 games on console, we’re actually looking more at an internal 720p to 960p resolution upscaled to 1440p.
The same flash also shows that dynamic lights like this currently don’t cast shadows. That’s not a problem for this particular scene, but it is curious – and as a fan of flash shadows in the muzzle, I’d like to see more shadow-casting dynamic lights.
Of course, given the length of the actual gameplay in the trailer, there isn’t much more to glean at this point – although I will mention that I’m a big fan of the sound they’ve created so far, with the voice acting. and music that all have great potential.
Overall, I’m just happy that the game actually exists and that they found a coherent vision for it. Given the lack of an announced release date, I suspect we’ll have to wait quite a while before Perfect Dark is ready. However, when that day comes, you can be sure we’ll be there with coverage, as this is one of the games I’m most curious about from Microsoft’s upcoming lineup.