The Initiative is partnering with Crystal Dynamics for Perfect Dark development

This is great news for all fanboys. Xbox is partnering with a well established developer and have a shot of making a great game. People who never were going to play it, or want to, can keep being concerned. Love it.

Honestly these ‘influencers’ in the gaming industry should seek out this information rather than give a very hot take that has little evidence for. At least Imran Khan knows what is up.

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Are Parris’ and Pez perhaps not fans of Crystal Dynamics’ games and that’s the reason they are concerned? Otherwise I do not get why they immediately jumped to such negativity. Apparently Parris will talk about it soon, so I guess I’ll check that.

“Perfect Dark has to be great”. ffs.

Tired of such takes.

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Yes it is. Especially if you want to generate content fast. That said, if The Initiative experiment goes well, it may open up opportunities going forward. I think there’s something exciting about being able to pull together a talented group of creatives without needing to build a 300 person studio around them. UE5 is a common game engine. Visuals are getting to the point of diminishing returns in terms of the gap between the best and next tier. The writers, artist, game designers, actors and music directors are going to be what makes the best games stand out.

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I think this is what’s behind their comments. But I can’t read their minds :stuck_out_tongue:

I gave it up the best part of a year ago. Amazing the positive effect avoiding that cesspool has on your mental state. Still have it installed on my phone to look at tweets people link to, and every time I do I glance at the comments and remind myself why.

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I listened to Parris’s Spaces yesterday. First off, I really like the dude but disagreed strongly with the take. I think his feelings will change once he gets more info. He was up front that he doesn’t know or understand the situation. He wants The Initiative to build the game themselves…even if it doesn’t come out for years. I don’t think he understands how much outsourcing goes on or what type of studio The Initiative is.

Jez just isn’t a fan of CD. That said, I expect Jez will do some digging and eventually provide more insight. The thing I respect about him is regardless of what his gut feeling is, he’ll still look for facts.

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They said that? Why even say this, is his applies to every freaking game and I am willing to bet my left…you know that these studios want the exact same thing. Every studio wants to knock it out of the park with their games.

I doubt Parris knows more, but I’ll check out what he has to say, whenever his podcast is.

The other day I had to check something on Twitter about the Redfall leaks and I immediately noticed how this would be one of the rare times I’d visit gaming related Twitter stuff because holy shit is that place infested with total man babies basically, it’s unbelievable what these people fight over and one take dumber than the other.

Yeah I’m good, I’ll stay here, YouTube a little, every now and then some Reddit. :wink:

Spaces is his podcast? Yeah he’s a cool guy for sure but if he doesn’t know how things work then he probably shouldn’t jump to conclusions too much or too soon.

As for Jez, hopefully he can come with some good facts and not stuff to bring more concern.

I love Jez, and I consider Jez’s opinion to be worse than Parris’s. He went on to question the game’s quality immediately. Why?

  • Should this not have been read as PD needing more manpower to finish the game?
  • Is the game being AAAA or AAA tied to the fact that Perfect Dark team should not ask for assistance to complete the project?
  • Are they blind to the fact that AAA budget for various teams does not mean the same size. For example, Ninja Theory believes in smaller (less than 100 teams) and larger times to make games. Does it mean that 343 and the Coalition or even Obsidian and The Inititative have to stick to NT standards.

I think ppl take transparency for granted. Naughty Dog had 1k+ ppl working for the game who were brought in from everywhere. They even had regular non-game animators working for the project. This was never disclosed by Sony, but was reveated through several articles.

Also, you want to question The Initiative is fine, but some xbox community folks questioning the credibility and the quality of Crystal Dynamics is beyond me.

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Yeah I don’t get it either. The TR games were all well made and in the case of Shadows of the Tomb Raider it is honestly one of the best looking games of last gen.

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They questioning CD cause of how Avengers turn out but that not entirely CD fault as SE probably forced them to make that game the same way as Eidos is probably being forced to make Guardians of the galaxy. I blame SE money hungry attempt at getting them Marvel money that they putting 2 of their best studios making shitty Marvel IP games.

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I think this is more like Square Enix is in a bad way and instead of layoffs, Microsoft reached out an olive branch to allow them to work on PD.

It was and is an experiment, that’s what I’ve always found interesting about the project.

Just buying/renting a premises, hiring some big industry names into a leadership group and saying ‘build an AAA studio’ is not the norm.

I’ve always argued against people on other forums who act like their founding date was the start of the development of their game – the “well The Initiative has been working on their game since 2018, so we should see something soon” sentiments. No, they haven’t been.

In 2018 you had a few new hires sitting in a room brainstorming about what the hell they were going to do. Over the next year or two it will have been making initial hires and prototyping ideas.

When they announced it was Perfect Dark, this was likely moving from prototyping ideas into pre-production. Now they say they are in ‘early development’ and that checks out enitely with what I speculated was going on behind the scenes.

The next step is on staffing up for full production, and that would usually be done by limited term contracts and hiring work-to-hire studios. Instead, they have landed not just an AAA developer, but the AAA developer the studio head used to run.

If you had asked Darell Gallagher a few months ago, preparing to make the moves to allow full production to start with a staff of about 70 people, what his dream scenario would be, I would imagine “well, if I had my old Crystal Dyanamics team back, life would be easier” – he’s got that. He’s got an entire studio with infrastructure he knows and played a role in building ready to go. It must be a dream for him.

Maybe if it works out well, and SE are willing, MS will acquire them and transform The Initiative from a small and agile team relying on contractors to a fully self sufficient AAA developer, who knows.

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I wonder why they’d announce this now. Could PD be making another appearance soon (like at TGAs)?

I just think the agreement is quite recent and Xbox and SE want to get ahead of it.

Yeah but if PD is on the release list for 2023, I’d be kind of suprised if this collaboration is just getting started. But I guess we’ll see.

Great news.

Not necessarily true. This agreement is probably confirmation that the game is in full development mode now and so having CD on for potentially 2 years is a long time.

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This is what I don’t understand. It sure seems like many observers have taken what is objectively good news and managed to spin it into something bad. I am really disappointed in some of the reactions I have seen from the “Xbox community.”

As best I can tell there are only a few potential explanations:

  1. They are arguing in bad faith/concern trolling.
  2. They don’t really understand The Initiative or game development and thus leap to poor conclusions.
  3. They have developed some kind of PTSD from the Xbox One generation, so now have permanent “glass half empty syndrome” when it comes to Xbox.
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