Perfect Dark turns 20 this year, and a new entry is likely going to be announced soon. I think it's important that a new Perfect Dark attempts to preserve the identity of the original.

Since at least 2018, a new Perfect Dark has been in development. We have few firm details about the project about the project except that The Coalition are working on its PvP multiplayer. The lead studio is not known, but suspicions have been mounting for some time that The Initiative are making the game's singleplayer.

But that's just context. What I wanted to talk about is the expectations and obligations of a new entry in a beloved game series.

There is a sentiment that is common among people who don't care for classic IPs that revivals should be a different game wearing the branding of the original. It starts with, "Oh, I wish it was a new IP instead." And then other people try to placate them by saying, "Don't worry. It may as well be a new IP. It probably won't have any similarities to the original beyond the name." And we're supposed to think this is a good thing. It first became noticeable with Fable 4. What should a Fable revival strive to do? In theory, it should strive to deliver on the ambition and failed promises of the Fable series as whole. Be the Fable game of your dreams. A Perfect Dark revival's goal should be to make a better Perfect Dark. To ignore the failure that was PD: Zero and focus on what made the original such an icon, elevate it to new heights.

It's like someone who doesn't care about Age of Empires saying, "Microsoft are making a new Age of Empires after 15 years? It's been so long that it may as well be a new IP as far as most people are concerned. There's no need to study the design of the older games in any way. Age of Empires is just a brand. You can do whatever. Age of Empires seems like fertile ground for an Uncharted competitor if you asked me."

The original Perfect Dark is iconic and beloved. Its art design, its music, its characters, its quirky British tone, its incredible lineup of inventive weapons, its objective-based mission design with complexity that scales with difficulty, and so on -- these things give Perfect Dark a distinct identity. And this is what any revival needs to look at and build upon. It doesn't matter if it changes stuff. It just has to never forget where it came from.

Chicago is patrolled by flying security robots that talk like Daleks. Joanna herself is a completely atypical FPS protagonist in terms of mannerisms and speech. (This is partially why her Zero incarnation is so hated.) Elvis is a distinctly British character. A distinctly "Rare" character. A grey alien who dresses in the American flag and speaks with the voice of a Scottish man impersonating Yoda, with immortal lines such as "Eat hard death, weirdos!". Doctor Carroll is a passive-aggressive flying laptop, basically.

The OG antagonists of Perfect Dark are small alien snakes that pilot 4-5 foot tall mech in battle and use holographic disguises to make themselves look like buff, whisper talking Scandinavian dudes.

The worst thing a new Perfect Dark could do is take this distinct vibe and flavour and turn it into something super generic. Who needs wild and inventive design when you can make everything gritty and "realistic"? Who needs quirky, charming characters when you can have reheated genre tropes because we're a grown up game for grown up audiences? Imagine a Banjo revival but all the rhymes are taken out. All the tongue in cheek adult humour. All the googly eyes. Let's just make the Army Men: Sarge's War of Banjo games. People will totally love that.

Most successful series revivals dig down into what people loved about the original and try to present it in a contemporary, improved package. Doom 2016 and Doom: Eternal play more like Quake than Doom, but they have that shared lineage. They have the setting of Doom. The demons. Mars. Hell. They have the iconic Doom Guy. They are respectful to the source. This doesn't mean that PD revived needs to have the same supporting cast of characters, the same conflict, etc. But it's about the things that make PD, PD.

The Resident Evil series went through a rough period and got back on track by finding new ways to utilize the iconography and mechanics of classic Resident Evil while mixing it with new things. Resident Evil didn't successfully revive itself by discarding everything people loved about Resident Evil. Resident Evil 7 doesn't have Umbrella or any classic characters besides a Chris Redfield cameo, but it has RE DNA down to its bones.

Valve successfully revived Half-Life by taking the design ideas of Half-Life and iterating on them in VR. It didn't make a completely unrelated game with zero HL DNA and call it Half-Life.

A good revival is about reviving a series. Not flaying it and wearing its skin to chase some flash in the pan audience like the Call of Duty audience or the Uncharted audience or whatever. A lot of game series crashed and burned when they abandoned their identity to chase trends.

Some people say that "Oh, well, Perfect Dark came out 20 years ago, so nobody will care whether a new PD respects the original." Bullfrog's Syndicate came out in 1993. Starbreeze's Syndicate 2012 came out 19 years later. It was a kinda decent game, but it flopped and the user reception was dominated by apathy and outrage. People had been waiting 15+ years for a new Syndicate and EA gave them THIS? A linear first person shooter where the protagonist becomes a good guy? In a SYNDICATE game? Not to mention Perfect Dark's remaster released in 2010 and was re-released in 2015 as part of Rare Replay. Perfect Dark isn't some super obscure game series. It's a multi-million selling series with multiple re-releases.

One of the most iconic design elements of the original Perfect Dark was that most of the enemies you were fighting were just doing their jobs. They were security guards working for a corporation. "Please... don't," they'd whisper as you held them at gunpoint. Many enemies could be disarmed by stealing their weapon or by shooting the weapon from their hand. Some, more aggressive enemies would run to retrieve their weapon or pull a backup handgun. Enemies would sometimes throw down their weapons (especially if multiple people in the room were dead) and say things like "I don't like this anymore." The closest thing we've gotten to a Perfect Dark-style surrendering system has been Metro Exodus. Metro has a very sober approach to killing. One of the most iconic vocal barks in Perfect Dark is "Why... me?" (There are a lot of iconic vocal barks.) "I don't wanna die." "Please, don’t shoot me."

This is where a new team could go horribly wrong if they fail to study the original game and try to understand its intent. Imagine a new Perfect Dark game where you kill everyone you meet, nobody ever surrenders, you can't disarm enemies or deal with them non-lethally, etc. This would be a total betrayal of Perfect Dark's soul. Even worse would be enemies pretending to surrender but then automatically attacking you. Many modern games are guilty of this.

With a game like Perfect Dark, you are a corporate agent and you have a job to do. You have a list of objectives and you complete them using gadgets, weapons, disguises, and a good old fashioned knockout punch to the back of the head. Sometimes people must die to achieve your goals. But the original PD paints killing people in a grim light. PD intentionally gives its NPCs personality and a will to live. They beg for their lives. They voluntarily surrender. This is exactly the kind of details a PD series revival needs to capture, because these are the details that make PD different to its peers.

It's like Thief. People love Thief (1998). People love Thief 2 (2000). People... kinda like Thief 3 (2004). People detest Thief 4. If Square Enix want to bring Thief back, they'll have no choice but to examine what Thief 1/2/3 did well and build upon that. That doesn't mean Thief can't reinvent itself into an open world game. It doesn't mean it can't experiment with stuff like third person. (Although first person is best for that style of stealth.) But removing all the elements that make Thief "Thief" and then trying to present it as a series revival would blow up in Square Enix's faces. And Perfect Dark faces a similar fate. I'm hoping for the best, of course.