According to Video Games Chronicle, a closer look at the LinkedIn profiles of former The Initiative staff members reveals that at least half of the studio’s employees have left in the past year. With less than 50 employees remaining, The Initiative is not in a good place. Furthermore, Video Games Chronicle reached out to former senior developers, who explained that The Initiative suffered terribly from a “lack of creative autonomy and slow development progress.” Interestingly enough, despite the evidence pointing otherwise, The Initiative is confident that it can push through as it is. TLDR; The Initiative is bleeding talent fast and the Perfect Dark reboot is having problems as a result.
The Perfect Dark series filled the void left by the success of GoldenEye 007, which many consider the best James Bond game ever released. Although it wasn’t based on an existing movie franchise, the series nevertheless was a massive success in the 2000s. Perfect Dark drew players in with an effective single-player campaign with a story that mostly revolved around its protagonist’s fight against the dataDyne corporation, a power-hungry entity seeking to take control of the extraterrestrial and supernatural. With Crystal Dynamics helping out The Initiative, a studio founded by former Crystal Dynamics studio head, Darrel Gallagher, the Perfect Dark Reboot has all the makings of a modern classic. Unfortunately, the game now finds itself in a similar situation with The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fable. Both aforementioned games aren’t anywhere close to a release and yet were revealed very early. Bethesda has since explained the reason for this, and it makes sense. Bethesda was in the midst of a self-created crisis following the release of Fallout 76, so the studio needed to reassure fans that it wasn’t going to abandon single-player games. At the same time, Xbox Game Studios has since apologized for having little to show for Fable. The main issue here is that the Perfect Dark franchise doesn’t possess anywhere near the same clout as Fable let alone The Elder Scrolls, nor are they reported to be having development issues. So, as much as we’d like to be the bearer of bad news, we don’t think that The Initiative is going to be at E3 2022, as per earlier leaks. Of course, we could still be mistaken, and the studio’s internal issues aren’t a problem at all. But, with Perfect Dark already losing its game director and design director, we wouldn’t bet on it.
