Light

When IO Interactive first announced it was uptaking work on what was then known as ‘Project 007’, the internet collectively cheered. There was one practically unanimous reaction: this is a match made in heaven.

I agree – it really is. Except it isn’t. Except it is. Such is the strange, fluid nature of the Bond franchise. In some ways it lines up perfectly with Hitman’s sublime espionage and seductively beautiful-yet-nihilistic ‘World of Assassination’. And yet Agent 007 is a totally different sort of character to Agent 47. The way Hitman feels in your hands is so specific, and in my opinion no matter how perfect a fit IOI was in other ways, I was nervous about that being replicated for Bond.

So I always felt that IO’s take on Bond would live or die by the studio’s ability to turn that difference into a strength rather than a weakness. After seeing a chunk of hands-off 007: First Light gameplay at IO Interactive’s Copenhagen headquarters, I’m convinced that the mad lads have done it. Mission accomplished. The best of Hitman is carried through – but without compromising the key pillars required for Bond to be Bond.

Image credit: IO Interactive / MGM

Central to this is Bond himself. Casting plays a role in this, with the announcement of Patrick Gibson as gaming’s official 007 a crucial piece of the picture – but much of it is mechanical. Agent 47 moves deliberately and with a stiff, almost mechanical nature. He’s literally a programmed contract killer, and so it makes sense that he is a little robotic. This also lines up well with Hitman’s mechanics, where that highly telegraphed movement plays into making sure everything is clear – if an action is safe to perform, if you’re in sight or stealth, and so on. But that isn’t Bond.

007 is impulsive, fluid. He needs to move not with stiff deliberation, but with a silky instinct. IO has addressed this in the core movement – Bond is much slicker than 47 even doing something as simple as picking up an item off a table – but also in mechanics. If you’re stealthing, when spotted 47’s only option is to get violent or leg it. As Bond, if you’ve enough Instinct, a limited resource, you can vocally bluff your way out of a situation. Bond can’t toss coins, but he can confidently throw his voice to attract a guard. If he runs out of ammo in a gunfight, a last-ditch thing he can do is throw his gun at the head of his would-be assailant. If the situation is hectic and he needs to pick up a rifle on the ground, he’ll stylishly kickflip it into his hands.

There’s quite a lot mechanically going on here, and that’s because in many ways First Light feels like what I’m going to call a composite game – a great big mingling of mechanics, ideas, and systems. When IO Interactive co-founder and First Light director Hakan Abrak explains the game, one gets a sense of how these mechanics get divided up, creating a game that is less structurally fluid than Hitman’s wide-open Rube Goldberg machine environments, but no less flowing.

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Deep Breath

“It breathes,” says Abrak of First Light.

That two word explanation is evocative enough alone, I think, without quoting his fuller explanation. Picture your midriff as you breathe. You inhale, and your body tightens. I subconsciously do this when a photo is taken, to look slimmer. When First Light inhales, it mechanically narrows.

You might be in an exposition-heavy walk-and-talk, Moneypenny in Bond’s ear as a beautiful environment unfolds before you. You might be in a narrow, prescribed gunfight where you can choose if you want to be a little bit left or right, high or low, but ultimately you’re in that gunfight. It might also be an extremely tightly-scripted stealth sequence. Internally, IO Interactive refers to these sections – the ‘inhale’ – as ‘guided’. Here First Light indeed begins to resemble many action-adventure jaunts I’ve played before, from Uncharted right back to some older Bond games like EA’s Everything or Nothing.

Now imagine the exhale. Everything slackens, the muscles relax, and if you’re anything like me, you’re a little more comfortable in your skin. IO Interactive calls these bits of Bond ‘core’, and it’s here where the Hitman heritage proudly flexes. You’re placed into open situations with an objective, but how you accomplish it is up to you.

Some of these areas might be vanishingly small compared to a Hitman level. In the publicly-available early-game mission shown in the State of Play, we see Bond arrive at a beautiful building home to some lavish gathering of the great and the good. He needs to get inside. The entrance to the building is itself a mini Hitman level. There’s a few different options for how to gain entry, but how exactly you approach that situation is up to you. Once inside, the game inhales again, directing you along a stricter path to keep the story moving.

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Even in this small example the differences and similarities to Hitman are laid bare. Bond is a little more constrained than 47. Bond isn’t going to injure civilian security guards for no reason, for instance. Bond also isn’t going to do crazy, stupid things. Walk close to a ledge that can be vaulted to reach an open window while a guard is watching, for instance, and the game straight up won’t let you do it. The ‘vault’ UI element appears, but is carefully crossed out. In Hitman, you could press the button and let all hell break loose as the guards go into overdrive. Indeed, Hitman is the sort of game where an accidental input – a shot fired by mistake, a door opened by a miscue – can ruin your run, by design. For Bond, everything is a little more contained. You can vault that wall – but you’ll need to create a distraction first.

The same is true for killing. In what I think is a tremendously clever use of the Bond iconography, you can’t just open fire willy-nilly. When Bond is in a situation where enemies are clearly out to kill him, a flashy UI element unfolds on screen declaring: [LICENSE TO KILL]. At this point, Bond is weapons-free. This is a key differentiator from Hitman, too – in a grand party, you can’t just get an assault rifle and spray the room – that isn’t how he does things.

There’s still an immense room for creativity, however – it’s just a different kind of creativity with less potential for unwarranted collateral. Say you need to get into a hidden area – Bond isn’t donning disguises (at least, not like 47 – there will be story-specific dress-up here and there), so you need alternatives. In some ways this is familiar to Hitman – in a mirroring of that game’s Paris, you might choose to pose as a member of a camera crew. For that you’ll need to socially charm the presenter with dialogue options to convince her you are indeed her replacement camera operator, and you’ll also need to track down a camera in the venue to use – which can be done in one of at least three ways. To even learn of this opportunity you’ll need to catch ambient dialogue, overhearing while circling the area that a TV producer is missing their cameraman. Alternatively, you could just sneak in – or you could pickpocket a pass from another guest, if you’re slick enough. On and on it goes, the game state shifting depending on your objectives and the path you take to them.

Image credit: IO Interactive / MGM

All of this suggests a game that is segueing from state to state. If you alert enemies in stealth but then quickly take out all of those alerted, a UI element will confirm that it’s [SITUATION CONTROLLED] – again a subtle difference to Hitman, where such situations could snowball easily and it sometimes was even not instantly clear if you were safe or not. Some of that Hitman paranoia and panic appears to be gone – but it’s replaced with swagger, because that’s who Bond is. That signalling is also there to tell you that you’ve seamlessly moved from one game state to another, in a sense.

In terms of controlling such situations, Bond has more flashy options than 47. He’s got a range of Q gadgets to distract – smoke bombs, knock-out darts, and so on. He can use his pure brass neck to convince a suspicious guard he’s meant to be there (though Hitman’s ‘enforcer’ style guards are back, and always see through Bond’s bluff). If things resolve to combat without that license to kill being activated, it’s fisticuffs in a tactile and frenetic combat system that’s full of using enemies’ momentum against them – flinging them this way and that, countering, parrying – it animates with enormously satisfying physicality and has shades of things like Batman Arkham and Mad Max. It’s a far cry from 47’s QTE-driven, over-in-seconds hand-to-hand.

Do you see the composite forming? Hitman’s stealth and open endedness in places, yes. But then there’s that counter-heavy combat, Uncharted-style spectacle, and tight-but-scrappy looking third-person shooting. Oh, and drifty, arcade-looking driving. Even in those segments that resemble Hitman, it differs: Bond can chat to people more, and there’s dialogue options and branching conversations where you can talk your way through situations with 007’s famous charm rather than have to sneak or subvert.

Going 360

I do hate marketing bluster. But occasionally some piece of phrasing cuts through – and for Bond, IOI has a term that is buzzier than a watch with a built-in circular saw. “We want to make a 360-degree Bond experience,” Abrak says in just one of many instances when I hear that geometry-based phrase. Yes, it’s marketing nonsense – but it does speak to a truth about James Bond.

In GoldenEye 007, Bond is basically the Doom Guy. There’s the odd gadget or bit of hacking here or there – but he’s mowing down wave after wave of soviet soldiers or terrorists. By Everything or Nothing, the developers had folded in things like car chases and maybe even the occasional spying sequence – but it was more or less all-action. IO wants to take a more holistic view of the character, and look at Bond from all angles rather than just action – thus 360-degree.

Image credit: IO Interactive / MGM

What is Bond? He’s charming, he’s creative. IOI wants its game to reflect all of that, which is why you’re as likely to find yourself in a ‘social space’ as in a linear shootout. Equally, those social spaces take a different form to Hitman – more constrained in some ways, but more open in others, such as with his ability to talk to key NPCs. Much of this is stuff that 47 would never do to this extent, if at all – and so I’m wary to describe this game as simply ‘Hitman with more action’, and am more wary still of anyone who might dilute it down to that. It’s more.

There’s another buzzy phrase I rather enjoyed on this studio visit – and this was one that felt less like a planned marketing term and more a quirk of phrase (and more something actively used in the studio). I heard people from all major branches of production – narrative, gameplay, audio – describe the desire to “put it on the sticks” – where “it” is the sensation of being Bond. Bond is one of the coolest characters in all of media – and so of course IOI’s desire is that players be in control of him when he’s performing his most impressive feats.

I’m all for this, though in something like this the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The grandest remaining hurdle that Agent 007 needs to pass is: to be playable. All of this is IOI talking the talk, showing us stuff that looks fabulous. Certainly, World of Assassination suggests it can walk the walk, too. But I hear the mantra that this satisfying action is ‘on the sticks’ and it gnaws at me that… I haven’t touched said sticks.

I’ve been doing this job for long enough to know that shooting can look slick and scrappy in video but then feel awful in practice – you need to feel it. The flow of a ‘social space’ can look great in a slickly-edited video but feel weird in-game. All of this remains to be tested. I need to, as IO reps put it, get ‘on the sticks’. But if IO Interactive’s walk channels Bond’s smirking swagger and is as strong as their talk, I could see this being an all-timer. As a Bond fan, I’m keeping everything crossed – and am more optimistic than ever.

This preview is based on a visit to IO Interactive’s HQ in Copenhagen. IOI provided travel and accommodation.

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