Perfect Dark Developer Responds To ‘Big Controversy’ Over 2024 Gameplay Trailer

Earlier today, we highlighted a claim that the 2024 Perfect Dark gameplay trailer wasn’t “indicative” of its overall progress, with a suggestion that it was “basically fake”. Now, one of the trailer’s developers has responded to this.

Taking to social media earlier today, former Perfect Dark level designer Adam McDonald explained that although parts of the trailer “did have fake stuff in it”, the demo was actually playable and was not intended to “knowingly lie to players about what the game will be” whenever it eventually released.

“This demo. It is actually in-engine. I was one of three level designers that worked on it. It worked best if you played it the way the person playing in the video plays it, but it still worked even if you didn’t hit the marks perfectly.”

“There’s some fake stuff in it, and the real gameplay systems shown off worked juuust enough to look good in this video. We were rapidly making real design decisions so as to not knowingly lie to players about what the game will be. The parkour is all real, the hacking/deception is mostly real.”

“The combat is “real” in that someone had to really do all that stuff in the video, but it’s set up to be played exactly that way and didn’t play well if you played it a different way.”

“I’m seeing big controversy over “THIS WHOLE THING WAS FAKE” and it’s annoying me, so I wanted to say something.”

Of course, it never ended up getting released anyway – Perfect Dark was cancelled and development studio The Initiative was shut down as part of yesterday’s Xbox layoffs – and it’s a move that seems to have surprised McDonald.

In follow-up posts, he said he’d heard the team had “turned a corner in recent months” and that things were “moving along” and going “better than ever” – in contrast to the “huge chunk of time” he spent in “development hell” at the studio.

So, to sum up, this trailer isn’t as “fake” as you might think! Yes, it seems there were a lot of caveats and workarounds to make it look this good, but it was an in-engine demo – and someone actually had to play it to create the footage.

What are your thoughts on this? Let us know down in the comments section below.