Far from being annoyed that people are focusing on how different the new James Bond game 007: First Light is from the Hitman games which preceded it, developer IO Interactive is actually “really happy” people are starting to appreciate the differences.
The studio’s comments come days after a wave of previews aired for 007: First Light ahead of the game’s 27th May release. Chris Tapsell wrote our 007: First Light preview and described a bombastic experience that’s much more linear than the murder-your-way approach of IOI’s celebrated Hitman series.
Chris wrote: “This is a very straightforward, really quite old school, linear third-person stealth-action game – at times, during my demo, so linear it’s essentially on rails. If you were hoping for the Hitman-but-Bond version, that might sound a little disappointing – I think it is a tad myself – but once you get your head around it, things look better.”
These takes were “expected”, narrative and cinematic director Marin Emborg told me at IOI’s office in Brighton recently – one of a handful of offices it operates around Europe. “To me it’s a relief that those views are represented, for sure. And I go, ‘That’s expected,’ but it feels like most people get what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and what we’re trying to achieve, and they feel the same way. Because when you play something for three and a half hours, that’s a big chunk. If you don’t get what we’re trying to do after three and a half hours then we’re not doing it very well.”
Emborg later added: “That’s actually one of the things that I’m really happy to see, that a lot of outlets are saying, ‘No, it’s not a Hitman game.’ And a few are going like, ‘Why is this not a Hitman game?’ That’s also expected. But for a character like Bond, he’s not Hitman; he’s kind of the reverse in many ways.”
Senior combat designer Thomas Marcham reinforced that same response: “We’re actually very happy that ‘it’s not Hitman’ headlines are getting out there,” he told me. “That’s important for us that you go in with the right expectations that this isn’t a Hitman game. It’s got some inspiration from it, it’s got a few mechanics, but it’s definitely a Bond game first and foremost.”
“A Silent Assassin run of Hitman: it would make a terrible Bond movie” -Thomas Marcham
Chris, in his 007: First Light preview, explains that there are moments in the game where you feel IOI’s Hitman heritage comes through, mostly in how the game presents you with some small areas that support a few different gameplay approaches. There are also usually stealth-or-action routes to take depending on your preference, so nods to Hitman’s up-to-you mentality are there.
But for a Bond game the formula had to change, because even though Hitman’s Agent 47 and 007: First Light’s James Bond are both secret agents, they both have very different ways of working. And in terms of spectacle, they are both presented a different way.
Bond is cinematic action, for example, which is why, despite some Hitman-like concessions, there are moments in 007: First Light where the game hems you in to experience dramatic set-pieces – Forced Escalation moments, they’re called. “One of the reasons we decided to do that was because if you look at something like a Silent Assassin run of Hitman, it would make a terrible Bond movie,” Marcham explained. “There’s no action, there’s no drama.”
So much of what you do in Hitman is planning and trial-and-error experimentation in order to lay the perfect line of event-dominos such that you perform a perfect assassination, which, almost by definition, is an assassination performed with as little fuss and commotion as humanly possible. And that’s not fun to watch. Indeed, there should be barely anything to see if performed expertly. “Yeah exactly,” Marcham said. “Hitman just walks in, changes outfits with someone, shoots someone in the head once and walks out.
“It’s not Bond so we knew we had to elevate that,” he added, “and that’s why we spent so much time on the combat, to make sure that when we do go full guns blazing and everything goes crazy, that it is just as rich of an experience as you’d expect – you don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything.”
Marcham was brought in specifically to “elevate” the Hitman combat system and make it more Bond. When he joined, the melee combat had the basis of an Arkham-like or Sifu-like flowing rhythmical approach, but no contextual prop or gadget use. Meanwhile, the game had Hitman’s gunplay, but it was rudimentary in third-person action-game terms because in Hitman, shooting was always used as a last resort.
“What we did is we took from the entire Bond ethos and we found these throughlines that are present in all the Bond media,” Marcham said. “He’s normally fairly brutal, so he’s pretty quick to throw a punch; he isn’t the guy who walks in the room and just starts shooting everyone, which is a big difference from Agent 47; and he’s very creative, so he’s creative but also improvisational, where you’ll often see a space and even when the camera is panning through, you’re not sure there’s any real opportunities in there, and then the fight starts out and suddenly there’s all kinds of weird things happening, where he’s grabbing a plant pot, or he’s shooting a pipe, and now there’s a smoke screen letting him run through.” That’s what Marcham and team tried to implement.
Difficulty in terms of the mental load asked of the player was another key consideration. Devising plans across large maps in Hitman requires holding a lot of variables in your head at the same time. “In Hitman, one of the things you often find is there’s this enormous kind of uncertainty right at the start of an encounter,” Marcham said, “so many options, so many different places you can go. And things can happen that are so far away that they’re quite abstract to you. Maybe someone gets spotted right at the start of the level and you don’t even remember what you did and that ruins your whole run.”
“The audience we had in mind is the Bond audience which … is lots and lots of people” -Thomas Marcham
IOI didn’t want this mental load for 007: First Light, because it wanted more forward momentum, so where there are freeform areas, they’re compartmentalised, so consequences won’t stretch across entire levels. “It’s a lot more forward facing,” Marcham said. “You’ll move through it and you won’t necessarily have to worry about what’s going on behind.” The upside of this is that “those challenges we put in front of you can be harder”, he added, “so we can put in more involved combat, because you’re not worried about what might have been happening five rooms ago, otherwise you’d end up with this kind of this impossible cognitive problem to solve.”
The other reason 007: First Light foregoes heavier mental load is because of who it’s aimed at. IOI isn’t trying to hide that this game is pitched at a wider audience than Hitman. “So the audience we had in mind is the Bond audience,” Marcham said, “which, because it’s such a long running and massively successful IP, is lots and lots of people, so we knew going in that would be a slightly broader audience, and we’re very aware of that.”
That’s why “we didn’t want to go quite so extreme with all the things you had to keep in your head” and why “we have some pretty extreme changes in our difficulty settings that allow you to play regardless of your experience”. It’s also why 007: First Light will initially play a lot more like other action games that are out there, so that you can easily migrate to it, before noticing the nuance and differences later on.
“We’re quite happy for you to take your previous experience from big blockbuster games and bring them into this, and it helps you get into our world, because it’s important to us that a wide range of players can play this, but also very hardcore, dedicated games still have a great time. That’s what they’re expecting from our studio as well,” Marcham said.
Whether or not this approach will work, or linger and distinctly in our memories as Hitman did and does, we’ll have to wait and see. Personally, I’m excited for a breezy cinematic action experience akin to an Uncharted, and we don’t have long to wait to play it, with 007: First Light due for release on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X on 27th May.
