Today Gregg Mayles revealed that there was once a game called Velvet Dark in the works at Rare. It would have been a “sister” title to Perfect Dark in his words. If you are unfamiliar with Velvet Dark she is Joanna Dark’s sister. When you played Perfect Dark cooperatively the second player would play as Velvet throughout the campaign.
In the picture included in his tweet we find lots of interesting things!
For starters we see something called Serum Background and Serum Abilities. Would the Serum Abilities play out something similar to the Plasmids from Bioshock giving Velvet Dark special abilities? The original Perfect Dark had many sci-fi elements at its core so it wouldn’t be hard to believe that there would be body/mind altering consumables in the world if that is what the Serums did.
We see lots of bullet points for the usual gaming mechanics you would think about for a First Person Shooter such as AI for enemies, multiplayer and level design. The squad level AI is something to scratch your head at. What exactly does this mean? In Perfect Dark the AI would already interact with each other. If you killed an enemy a nearby enemy would run over and make a comment about his dead friend. In Velvet Dark would the enemies have coordinated better when trying to attack you? Perhaps there was special groups of enemies you would encounter that played differently from the other enemy AI. Maybe Squad refers to 4 player co-op and how the enemy AI would react to having 4 players in the campaign versus just 1 or two.
One of the other interesting bullet points is the Gameboy Advanced Compatibility. We all know about the famous Gameboy Camera feature that was going to be included in Perfect Dark but was scrapped. What kind of compatibility was Rare planning with the Gameboy Advanced? Let us know what you can gather from the document in the comments below!
https://twitter.com/Ghoulyboy/status/626135899164774400