Xbox’s canceled Perfect Dark game almost got a second chance

[Dany28]

Perfect Dark is one of the most anticipated blockbusters in the first-party Xbox portfolio. To bad it was suddenly canceled earlier this summer and amid mass cuts at Microsoft. https://kotaku.com/perfect-dark-canceled-take-two-embracer-xbox-crystal-dynamics-2000622400

 

[Tortuga]

Ah yes Perfect Chin
I dunno who anticipated that "blockbusters" game looked pretty bland and boring, and honestly i think nothing was lost

 

[moonbits]

Microsoft are such dumbasses

 

[Bomberman]

Looked like fun. Microsoft seems to be terrible at managing software companies in a hilarious inversion of their name's principle declaration.

 

[Segadude113]

Ah yes Perfect Chin
I dunno who anticipated that "blockbusters" game looked pretty bland and boring, and honestly i think nothing was lost

it's the gameplay i wanted to see more of.

 

[qw90700]

Another game I learned it exist until it was cancelled lol. I was surprised that they actually developing it, but not so surprising because lazy industry has no vision but all they have is heating ancient pizzas again and sell it for fresh pizza price lol.

Playing the original game back then never thought the game is "good" per se. I disliked the level design and the boring "pew pew" shooting gameplay, but this is what Americans like. Give them a shooter game and they would be like "murica fuck yeah" just because they love shooting to shoot. So there was really no way this game would fail and it would be hard to develop per se. It's just pew pew action game. I guess they weren't satisfied that this simple game require too much budget that they initially planned, otherwise they would wrap things up and sell it in its unfinished way to cover the money they lost developing it at least a little!!! After all they can finish the game after 5 years of its release and also sell nonsense DLCs like bikini and shit to satisfy horny teens lol. Or they could be like "me Microsoft is a small indie company" and sell the game via early access lolol.

So what this shit tells me that, considering they were even developing this rubbish game but then they pulled out can mean Microsoft doesn't think video game industry will grant them significant profit they would care about in terms of they are not confident they can exist okay in the video game industry anymore. Perhaps they finally realized their games are waste of existence, they were just ok at selling their rubbish XBOX to prevent some part of console market profit being stolen by Japan lol. Now what they should realize is their rubbish Game Pass is not a good idea when even Steam and in general digital video game distribution platforms are not a good idea due to DRM and "they delete your game from your library yo" BS. Once we believed "it's good that I can just buy and download my game" they made us say "damn I wish they sold the games via disc and I would glad to use Bluray-drive" lol. People wanna own what is worth buying and spend time on and wanna keep what they own but these twats believes people mindlessly wanna pay and never care what they pay for. Shit doesn't work like that. AAA company my ass, it's run by headless chickens lol.

 

[Segadude113]

Another game I learned it exist until it was cancelled lol. I was surprised that they actually developing it, but not so surprising because lazy industry has no vision but all they have is heating ancient pizzas again and sell it for fresh pizza price lol.

Playing the original game back then never thought the game is "good" per se. I disliked the level design and the boring "pew pew" shooting gameplay, but this is what Americans like. Give them a shooter game and they would be like "murica fuck yeah" just because they love shooting to shoot. So there was really no way this game would fail and it would be hard to develop per se. It's just pew pew action game. I guess they weren't satisfied that this simple game require too much budget that they initially planned, otherwise they would wrap things up and sell it in its unfinished way to cover the money they lost developing it at least a little!!! After all they can finish the game after 5 years of its release and also sell nonsense DLCs like bikini and shit to satisfy horny teens lol. Or they could be like "me Microsoft is a small indie company" and sell the game via early access. lolol.

So what this shit tells me that, considering they were even developing this rubbish game but then they pulled out can means Microsoft doesn't think video game industry will grant them significant profit they would care about in terms of they are not confident they can exist okay in the video game industry anymore. Perhaps they finally realized their games are waste of existence, they were just ok at selling their rubbish XBOX to prevent some part of console market profit being stolen by Japan lol. Now what they should realize is their rubbish Game Pass is not a good idea when even Steam and in general digital video game distribution platforms are not a good idea due to DRM and "they delete your game from your library yo" BS. Once we believed "it's good that I can just buy and download my game" they made us say "damn I wish they sold the games via disc and I would glad to use Bluray-drive" lol. People wanna own what is worth buying and spend time on and wanna keep what they own but these twats believes people mindlessly wanna pay and never care what they pay for. Shit doesn't work like that. AAA company my ass, it's run by headless chickens lol.

Metroid Prime 4 had a development cycle that was just as chaotic and long, but at least it's still releasing.

 

[Elwiwi]

Metroid Prime 4 had a development cycle that was just as chaotic and long, but at least it's still releasing.

Don't jinx it please

 

[NotReallyHere]

Personally, I'm glad they pulled the plug on this one. It kind of felt doomed from the start.

While the articles I've read about its possible "second chance" has been a little vague, the general feeling seems to be that Take Two was interested, but only if they got control of the Perfect Dark IP afterward. Microsoft obviously wasn't going to sign off on this, so the deal fell through.

(Personally, I don't feel the IP is all that valuable to begin with, but that's just my opinion...)

It reminds me of a story I read, from back when Microsoft bought Rare. When the deal went through, the boardroom at MS was ecstatic, as they thought they had just secured the rights to the Donkey Kong franchise, as well! WHOOPS!! But it goes to show how these decisions are sometimes made by people who are not as knowledgeable about the intellectual properties they're seeking to acquire, as they maybe should be.

Anyone who thought that Rare owned the Donkey Kong IP - at any point in time - really didn't bother to do their research

 

[Segadude113]

Personally, I'm glad they pulled the plug on this one. It kind of felt doomed from the start.

While the articles I've read about its possible "second chance" has been a little vague, the general feeling seems to be that Take Two was interested, but only if they got control of the Perfect Dark IP afterward. Microsoft obviously wasn't going to sign off on this, so the deal fell through.

(Personally, I don't feel the IP is all that valuable to begin with, but that's just my opinion...)

It reminds me of a story I read, from back when Microsoft bought Rare. When the deal went through, the boardroom at MS was ecstatic, as they thought they had just secured the rights to the Donkey Kong franchise, as well! WHOOPS!! But it goes to show how these decisions are sometimes made by people who are not as knowledgeable about the intellectual properties they're seeking to acquire, as they maybe should be.

Anyone who thought that Rare owned the Donkey Kong IP - at any point in time - really didn't bother to do their research

I think the real reason Microsoft bought Rare was to take away Nintendo's greatest asset. They know Donkey Kong is Nintendo, it was their first IP for crying out loud. They bought Rare to deal a blow to Nintendo in the 6th gen. That's why they did jack all with Rare. Think about it. What's the hottest seller on the OG XBOX? Halo. An FPS game by Bungie that Microsoft snatched from Apple at the last minute. Who makes the FPS games on competing hardware? Rareware at Nintendo. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. It's more than Donkey Kong. They wanted what Nintendo had, and Nintendo didn't value them enough to buy them outright. They lost out.

 

[NotReallyHere]

I think the real reason Microsoft bought Rare was to take away Nintendo's greatest asset. They know Donkey Kong is Nintendo, it was their first IP for crying out loud. They bought Rare to deal a blow to Nintendo in the 6th gen. That's why they did jack all with Rare. Think about it. What's the hottest seller on the OG XBOX? Halo. An FPS game by Bungie that Microsoft snatched from Apple at the last minute. Who makes the FPS games on competing hardware? Rareware at Nintendo. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. It's more than Donkey Kong. They wanted what Nintendo had, and Nintendo didn't value them enough to buy them outright. They lost out.

No argument

Though it is humorous that some within Microsoft did, indeed, think they owned Donkey Kong after buying Rare.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2...t_they_owned_donkey_kong_after_acquiring_rare

"They know Donkey Kong is Nintendo." Welp, apparently, at least one of them didn't

 

[Adrastia]

Ah yes Perfect Chin
I dunno who anticipated that "blockbusters" game looked pretty bland and boring, and honestly i think nothing was lost

The chin's not that bad. I mean I get it and I laughed too. But she's not Mac Tonight or anything. At least there was that.

 

[qw90700]

Metroid Prime 4 had a development cycle that was just as chaotic and long, but at least it's still releasing.

Nintendo won't give up on their game!!!... because it's all they have lol.

Nintendo is a small indie video game company lol so of course they will stick to their games but Sony and Microsoft is not just a video game company. They can make money from other industries, that's why they love to genocide their games and their potential in the video game industry and why Nintendo keep spamming same games for decades lol.

 

[Ezri_Muldoon]

Legacy IP Resurrected with none of the original creative team and a pre-production cycle that dragged out for so long it might as well been a money laundering scheme.

This screamed impending skinsuit franchise, I'm glad it was cancelled.

We have enough games, animated series and films that use a recognisable brand name as nothing more than a shell for someone's unrelated creative ambitions. Modern media is littered with projects that couldn't obtain funding as a new IP so that parasitized something beloved and twsist it into a monstrosity that forever taints its legacy and fractures its fanbase.

Perfect Dark & Rare deserve better then that.

 

[Segadude113]

Legacy IP Resurrected with none of the original creative team and a pre-production cycle that dragged out for so long it might as well been a money laundering scheme.

This screamed impending skinsuit franchise, I'm glad it was cancelled.

We have enough games, animated series and films that use a recognisable brand name as nothing more than a shell for someone's unrelated creative ambitions. Modern media is littered with projects that couldn't obtain funding as a new IP so that parasitized something beloved and twsist it into a monstrosity that forever taints its legacy and fractures its fanbase.

Perfect Dark & Rare deserve better then that.

great, now i'm worried about Jet Set Radio at Sega. Oh well, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is the real Jet Set Radio 3 anyway. Thank god for fans.

 

[Tetronomicon]

It feels like the Microsoft Gaming division is in such a weird position right now. On one level, they're in a fairly dominant position on PC with their OS (as much as I'm looking forward to The Year of the Linux Desktop, it still hasn't made much a dent even with a multi-billion dollar gaming company (Valve/Steam) behind it). They've also basically set themselves up as a 3rd-party game developer not just as a software company but as hardware company (something Sega probably wishes they could have done).

But my god... their internal game development workflow/pipeline is filled with nothing but shit and sewage. It has become far worse than it ever was in previous eras (which is saying a lot). Blows me away that the same company that published Age of Empires and Freelancer can't manage to even throw enough developers in the same room to make a game in an already established IP. Seems like the shortcut would haven been to just let the studio that made the IP work on it instead of having them on some other thing (Everwild) that also got cancelled on the same day as said IP did. The staggering irony of it all.

Then again, considering Rare made Perfect Dark Zero...

I think the real reason Microsoft bought Rare was to take away Nintendo's greatest asset. They know Donkey Kong is Nintendo, it was their first IP for crying out loud. They bought Rare to deal a blow to Nintendo in the 6th gen. That's why they did jack all with Rare. Think about it. What's the hottest seller on the OG XBOX? Halo. An FPS game by Bungie that Microsoft snatched from Apple at the last minute. Who makes the FPS games on competing hardware? Rareware at Nintendo. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. It's more than Donkey Kong. They wanted what Nintendo had, and Nintendo didn't value them enough to buy them outright. They lost out.

My understanding was that Nintendo wanted to offload Rare for reasons ranging from underwhelming outcomes throughout the N64 era (which in my opinion comes down to Nintendo and their third-party off-putting design decisions on the N64 itself... as well as just Nintendo's policies towards them (Square with Final Fantasy comes to mind here)) to not wanting to be upstaged by a developer they had an investment in (let's be honest... Donkey Kong was basically a dead franchise till Rare made the Country trilogy and most of their N64 platformers could go toe to toe on Nintendo's own system).

There's no buyer without a seller. Nintendo could have probably bought them outright if they wanted to. They apparently decided to sell their share in Rare to Microsoft at the same time Rare did as well.

Needless to say, it's rather unsurprising Nintendo took any offer someone would give them regardless if buyer even knew what they we're purchasing in the first place. Desperately pawning it off to the first comer seems in line with them at the time.

I disliked the level design and the boring "pew pew" shooting gameplay, but this is what Americans like. Give them a shooter game and they would be like "murica fuck yeah" just because they love shooting to shoot. So there was really no way this game would fail and it would be hard to develop per se. It's just pew pew action game.

As someone from the nation whose greatest claim to fame is our mass shootings, I can assure you we're as underwhelmed as the rest of the world when it comes to the FPS market.

Also, weird to think MURICA FUCK YEAH from an IP made in the country we pew pewed our independence from but okay...

 

[iamthemilkman]

Metroid Prime 4 had a development cycle that was just as chaotic and long, but at least it's still releasing.

As excited as I am, I'm slightly concerned to have learned that a bunch of ex-343 devs are at Retro working on it. After seeing what 343 did to Halo, I'm skeptical. While Nintendo tends to have higher standards than Microsoft, they did release Other M.