The art of reveal is a difficult thing – and in our current industry, most publishers prefer trailers loaded with pre-rendered CGI or snippets captured throughout the game. Still, I’ve always preferred a different approach: a linear series of events showcasing 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 game vision of a title in one place – a way to help players understand what kind of game a developer is creating. With the Perfect Dark reboot finally revealed during this year’s Xbox preview, I was excited to see a return to the format.
There’s no doubt that preparing for Perfect Dark was full of challenges. It was first named six years ago in a simple trailer, then the studio went radio silent and rumors suggested it was in rough shape. However, with this new trailer, we finally feel like we have a vision of what the team wants to achieve. This is still very much a vertical cut – it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that nothing else from the game’s campaign has yet been created – 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. At first glance, the original Perfect Dark is a type of shooter that largely doesn’t exist anymore. It’s mission and objective driven, full of gadgets and other unique scenarios, but the central mechanics, level design and flow are very much of the era. There is one current game, known as Agent 64, that builds on this style of play perfectly – the demo is excellent and fun – but it’s not necessarily what you’d want from a full reboot.
Instead, The Initiative decided to build a game that integrates elements of immersive sims with first-person parkour, not unlike Mirror’s Edge. While we don’t yet know the scope of the game, this trailer does hint that players will have options to handle the stage. In this case, it’s an infiltration mission, which means some freedom in how you achieve your goal.
A few things that caught my eye. 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 of these kinds of games. We’re also seeing things like different vision modes and a voice recorder, suggesting that gadgets will make a return, as you’d hope. The question is whether there are alternative solutions – for example, it uses a voice recorder to bypass the gate at one point, while a proper immersive sim (“im-sim”) might allow alternative methods of infiltration.
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 the exploding fire extinguisher, and I really hope we see more interaction elements like that. Of course, since this demo has been mostly stealth-focused up until this point, I’m also curious to see what their plans are for enemy behavior – a huge part of any game like this. If the enemy is too sensitive or not sensitive enough, it can break the whole thing.
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Another key element that they got right in this trailer is the weapons themselves and the way they are presented. You 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 gun in particular has a shiny texture that feels like a nod to the original, yet with the technical advantages 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 to my eye it feels snappy. I like the direction they’re going – and that goes for the technology that powers the game, at least from our initial view.
First, despite the involvement of Crystal Dynamics, this game is built using Unreal Engine 5. I’m disappointed that we don’t see an evolution of Crystal’s excellent internal technology, but what we have so far looks good.
It is unclear whether this demo was made on PC or Xbox. While PC is most likely, due to the ease of creating video assets, something about the image quality and performance characteristics gave me pause. Specifically, while it’s hard to tell with compressed video, the pixel counts I was able to complete were 1440p or slightly higher. In addition, the framerate in this trailer No stable – which could also be true for the PC build given how early it is in development, but it’s not clear. Either way, I’m not here to pass judgment on either of these elements – it’s ultimately just academic at this point, but it looks like what’s here could run on console hardware.
The game also appears to utilize the full set of Unreal Engine 5 techniques. What appears to be Lumen can be spotted from the rich indirect lighting in areas such as the darkened alleys at the start of the trailer or corridors later on. Here too you can really notice the typical RTGI (ray-tracing global illumination) noise. This seems to be a Lumen software path rather than a hardware path, as we see some artifacts common to the use of screen space information that augments SDF-based reflections. Still, it’s not unexpected for a 60fps title, and the game still looks good.
We also noticed the use of virtual shadow maps, which allows for very fine detail in the shadows, including the fine detail of the grass at the end of the trailer.
That said, while going through the footage I noticed some oddities that I could touch on – and again, this is not a commentary on the final game. The scene that enabled pixel counting basically has a flash that exposes both unattached edges ~1440p and more loss of detail than we would expect from this resolution. This suggests that, like many other 60fps Unreal Engine 5 games on the console, we’re actually looking at something more like an internal 720p to 960p resolution upscaled to 1440p.
The same flash also reveals that dynamic lights like this do not currently cast shadows. That’s not a big deal for this particular scene, but it’s odd – and as a fan of muzzle flash shadows, I’d like to see more dynamic shadow-casting lights.
Of course, given the length of actual gameplay in the trailer, there’s not much to glean at this point – although I will mention that I’m a big fan of the sound they’ve created with the voice acting so far. and music has great potential.
Overall, I’m just glad the game actually exists and they found a cohesive vision for it. With the lack of an announced release date, I suspect we’ll be waiting quite a while for Perfect Dark to be 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.