Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it’s shutting down The Initiative studio and canceling the game Perfect Dark. A report then surfaced, suggesting that the game’s Xbox Games Showcase 2024 trailer was fake. But that’s not fully true. A former dev said the demo shown was a playable vertical slice.

Adam McDonald, a level designer who worked on the 2024 version of the game, said the demo was made using the game engine and could be played. It wasn’t representative of the final product. But, it was a vertical slice, and everything we saw in the trailer was in-engine.

Now, what’s a vertical slice? For those who don’t know, back in the E3 days, publishers were creating special demos of their games. Those demos had in-engine assets, and they were faking some stuff to make things more exciting. Two good examples of misleading vertical slices are Watch_Dogs and Anthem.

The big difference between a vertical slice and a fake trailer is that the latter is not playable in any way. It’s a mess of different sections that can barely work together. For instance, the trailer for Abandoned was a fake trailer. The E3 2001 trailer for Duke Nukem Forever was also a fake trailer. And, in my opinion, the full-on destruction system of Crackdown 3 was a HUGE BIG LIE. Or the E3 2009 Project Natal Milo Tech Demo.

According to Adam, most of the fighting, parkour, hacking, and sneaky gameplay were real in the demo. But Crystal Dynamics and The Initiative did fake a few things to make the game look better than it actually was at the time. Still, this wasn’t a full fake trailer. It just wasn’t representative of what the game looked or played like at that time. So, it had some fake stuff (like all vertical slices), but it was not all fake.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Most of the “E3 Demos” are vertical slices. Even the 3D demos of your favourite games were “fake” demos. Cyberpunk 2077? Yes, it was. The Witcher 3? Yup. Ghost Recon Future Soldier? Of course and it was.

Ubisoft was well known for misleading vertical slices, which is why the one that was criticized the heaviest when it came to video-game downgrades. Even new games have been shown with misleading trailers. Remember the trailers for STALKER 2? Or for Starfield? Or for Dying Light 2?

What I mean is that there’s a big difference between a vertical slice and a totally fake trailer. Still, both are inexcusable. Devs shouldn’t fake things just to make their games look better than they really are. They should show the game as it truly is during development. And if it’s not ready yet, they should wait until it is before showing anything.

Here’s Adam’s full message, so go ahead and take a look at it.

“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.”