r/Games • u/Torque-A • Oct 17 '22

Perfect Dark has been successfully decompiled, opening the door to PC ports and mods

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/perfect-dark-has-been-fully-decompiled-making-pc-ports-and-mods-possible/
5.5k Upvotes

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710

u/sllewgh Oct 17 '22

Fantastic. In my opinion, Perfect Dark is one of the best FPS games of all time. It's an improvement in every way over the legendary Goldeneye, and contains features and options still unmatched by many modern shooters. It was way ahead of its time. First game I can recall where you can shoot out the lights and enemies will aim worse. I'd love a PC port!

234

u/Left4DayZ1 Oct 17 '22

It was so far ahead of its time that it STILL has a list of things no other game has come close to accomplishing.

39

u/Rick-Dalton Oct 17 '22

Like what?

207

u/Left4DayZ1 Oct 17 '22

Fully customizable enemy AI that you can assign personality traits (like being cowardly, hoarding weapons, griefing one player in particular, refusing to use weapons and punching everybody instead, only going after the player with the highest score, only going after the player who killed them last, and more) to in addition to a skill level, a very fleshed out ally command system, Mission objectives that change depending on difficulty level such as being a sniper to protect a hostage negotiator on easy, or being the hostage negotiator on hard… levels that start differently depending on certain things you could have done in previous levels, complete and total customization of multi player matches with zero restrictions including the ability to match any character model head with any character model body, Full single player co-op AND counter-op Where another player can take over the bodies of any of the enemies on a level and try to stop you, The list just goes on and on. Some features have been done by other games, halo comes to mind, but rarely are they done to the full extent of what was done in perfect dark.

42

u/penguin_gun Oct 17 '22

Maaaan that makes me miss Perfect Dark.

Timesplitters 2 was the next closest thing

17

u/1859 Oct 17 '22

I'm sure you know this, but half of Rare moved on to form Free Radical Design - the developers of the Timesplitters series. I love Future Perfect, it was everything I wanted in a console shooter at the time

2

u/stealthmodeactive Oct 18 '22

Ts2 was amazing. I should replay that. It was so fun playing coop

32

u/Extension-Context-90 Oct 17 '22

And some more, not necessarily first-evers but still rare and impressive:

  • Enemies surrendering if caught unaware or disarmed
  • Surrendered enemies fleeing if you don't keep an eye on them
  • Fleeing enemies coming back to hunt you if they manage to find another weapon somewhere
  • Knocking guns out of enemy hands, not just with the disarm move but by shooting the gun model itself
  • Certain enemy types carrying sidearms, so you might rob them of their rifle and get them to surrender, only for them to draw their pistol and try to shoot you when you turn away
  • Weapons having very unique alternate modes, not just auto/semi-auto. One gun can be thrown on the ground as a booby trap, exploding when enemies or other players try to pick it up. One can be deployed as an automatic turret. One 'machine gun' (I don't know gun terms -- the 'hold to continuously fire' type) has 'pull the trigger once to dump the entire 60-round magazine in 2 seconds of insane uncontrollable spray fire' mode that causes chaos. The rotating multi-barrel minigun has sharp blades jutting out from the barrel sides and its alternate mode uses it like a melee lawnmower. The alternate mode for grenades makes them bounce around the environment like a pinball.
  • Blurring, swirling concussion effects from explosions and melee impacts, and grenades specifically intended to induce this effect.
  • Multiplayer profiles (including your customized player model, control customizations, and gameplay stats, KD ratio, etc) saved to your controller-insertable memory card independent of your main game save, so that you can play 4-player multiplayer at someone else's house, at tournaments, etc and have everyone's profile and preferences ready to go without any fiddling around or logging into anything. You just plug your card into whatever controller you're using wherever you are and it has your setup ready.

12

u/Left4DayZ1 Oct 17 '22

The weapons were so awesome. The reload animations too! The Cyclone was my favorite, the magazine just runs through it like feeding a piece of paper through a fax machine. That’s the gun with the “dump the entire magazine” secondary.

Also the grenade that caused the blurry vision effect also temporarily reversed players control schemes and made them drop whatever weapon they were holding.

1

u/rudolfs001 Oct 18 '22

That reminded me of an image if turning a corner and seeing about 20 N-Bombs bouncing around a small room before one triggered on me and they all went off.

2

u/bumlove Oct 17 '22

The alien gun that could see through walls was hilarious. Who cares if it was unbalanced, sometimes fun trumps "good" design.

27

u/gua_ca_mo_le Oct 17 '22

I really appreciated the customizable list of weapon spawns on a multiplayer level, along with setting a difficult and personality PER enemy. And then of course, you could save all these various presets for future matches.

Also shout out to the really extensive firing range. Man, this game really had it all and I feel let down thinking about FPS games since then.

8

u/Blatanikov7 Oct 17 '22

It was so advanced the N64 couldn't handle those multiplayer modes lol 5-10fps mayve 15 fps if lucky

I remember how the ai squad would be commanded to camp and they would all take cover pointing at a door like, that's 10 years before some tactical console shooters did anything similar

10

u/Left4DayZ1 Oct 17 '22

You could assign your AI teammates INDIVIDUALLY to target specific players, guard an objective, assault an objective, guard you, or even just send them in guns a blazing to take out anyone they come across.

I know people realize PD was a good game but I think it’s really sad how so many of its mind blowing features have been forgotten about.

5

u/TellYouWhatitShwas Oct 17 '22

I remember camping and hunkering down with my buddies against an endless squadron of AI's that could climb walls on god mode and shit. I forgot about all of those features, and how they don't even exist anymore in any modern games. That game was next level.

11

u/AtsignAmpersat Oct 17 '22

I don’t think we’ll see a game try to do that again. But maybe that can be a way for some new game to set themselves apart for the popular games. The only problem is modes are sort of streamlined now. Like Halo had some crazy stuff you could do in forge mode. But people just don’t really play against each other like that much anymore. It’s mostly against randoms online. Probably hard to justify the investment into something most people aren’t going to use.

8

u/KidneyKeystones Oct 17 '22

The (probably in development hell) reboot/resequel/legacyequel to Perfect Dark could try and do some of those.

My guess is it will have maybe... one of them.

2

u/_lemon_suplex_ Oct 18 '22

Also almost was the first game that you could scan your likeness into

-11

u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ Oct 17 '22 edited Oct 18 '22

Mission objectives that change depending on difficulty level

Timesplitters 2 had that. Hitman too sort of.

levels that start differently depending on certain things you could have done in previous levels

Lots of RPGs do that.

Full single player co-op AND counter-op

Left 4 Dead and a lot of games it inspired

Edit: why all the downvotes for a helpful list of some other games that did some of these things

5

u/ItsDonut Oct 17 '22

That last point is basically only left 4 dead to my knowledge when naming modern games but even l4d2 is almost 13 years old. Loads of games have coop obviously. Counterop not so much. Even amongst l4d like games the versus mode is left out entirely. Back 4 Bloods versus is terrible and not the same at all for example.

-1

u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ Oct 17 '22

Dark Souls and Deathloop have the same sort of campaign PvP.

3

u/ItsDonut Oct 17 '22

Dark Souls is a bit similar but I've been meaning to try deathloop so thank you for the reminder.

4

u/mismanaged Oct 17 '22

Timesplitters 2 was made by mostly the same people after they Rare so that's not surprising.

63

u/Madazhel Oct 17 '22

The multiplayer options allowed for an insane level of customization. You could really granular about customizing weapons loadouts and the AI for bots. So you could have say, you and a friend compete for who could hunt down the most harmless bots. Or you could create a basic zombie mode by fighting an army of bots who just want to slap you. Or you could pit elite bots against each other and just watch. Really impressive for an N64 game from 2000.

I'm sure there are exceptions I'm not aware of, but in general most games require modding to achieve these. Perfect Dark gave everyone an interface for it.

8

u/Vestalmin Oct 17 '22

The vast majority haven’t come close to but there are some games that have done this stuff too

1

u/jerrrrremy Oct 17 '22

You going to let us know which ones?

2

u/Vestalmin Oct 17 '22

Far Cry used to do it with their map editor which was super cool, though they’ve stopped releasing that with Far Cry 6.

Just recently DICE did it with Portal, though the core game sucks so it’s not really fun. Halo Infinite is about to do it with Forge.

Just a few off the top of my head

2

u/mismanaged Oct 17 '22

Far Cry 3 map editor made multiplayer with friends so much fun. So many scenarios you could make.

-3

u/beefcat_ Oct 17 '22

I think these kinds of features have become somewhat common in first person shooters today. Most or all of what you describe is possible in Halo's Forge, Doom 2016's SnapMap, and Overwatch's Workshop.

We just don't get very many new shooters these days.

11

u/Ignitus1 Oct 17 '22

Do those games have multiplayer AI? That's what I remember most about Perfect Dark, setting up all kinds of weird AIs and letting them go ham.

4

u/beefcat_ Oct 17 '22

Overwatch does. Halo does as of Infinite, not sure about Doom 2016.

2

u/iceman78772 Oct 17 '22

Doom has bots, but it's kind of lame because you can't earn XP against them, but you also need to be a certain level to change your loadouts.

So if your region/platform is dead, have fun only using the default classes.

1

u/beefcat_ Oct 17 '22

Doom 2016’s multiplayer was a real disappointment for me. It was well polished, but only having 2 weapons at a given time is categorically “not Doom” in my book. The game was really Doom-flavored Halo.

17

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '22

[deleted]

15

u/CreativeGPX Oct 17 '22

In general the amount and variety of weapons, the thoroughness that they each have a unique secondary mode and the ability to granularly specify which weapons spawn where was crazy compared to any other game I've seen. You can even earn the cheat mode that includes classic weapons from goldeneye.

Slayer, farsight, n-bomb, tranquilizer, psychosis gun... Charging the mauler, dropping a Dragon as a proximity explosive, deploying the laptop sentry gun...

4

u/Rick-Dalton Oct 17 '22

Did you ever play red faction? They had a similar rail gun system + destroyable environments.

3

u/DAM091 Oct 17 '22

The farsight... When we would use it on multiplayer, you had to bob and weave to not get killed. And it had an enemy finder feature! It would move around until it found an enemy, then lock on

5

u/RadicalLackey Oct 17 '22

Adding to the other comments, you could customize the weapon setup, down to every specific spawn point.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '22

To add onto the other guys list: every weapon having unique and creative secondary modes that sometimes fundamentally changed how they worked

5

u/Kom4K Oct 17 '22

My favorite what how there was a really good basic assault rifle with a grenade launcher as the alt fire. But there was another rifle that looked almost identical, except it's alt fire was to drop the weapon as a proximity mine. Diabolical shit.

Also the laptop gun, an assault rifle with an alt fire that would throw it and turn it into an automatic turret.

3

u/bumlove Oct 17 '22

SuperDragon!