007 First Light Dev Explains What Makes It Different From A Hitman Game

Since Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale in 1953, James Bond has been synonymous with intrigue, high-stakes espionage, and getting the job done. The character has lived in different ways, through different actors, across different eras of international politics and Hollywood economics. James Bond video games have traditionally just mimicked whichever incarnation of the character was currently in vogue.

But with 007 First Light, developer IO Interactive is getting a chance to invent a version of Bond from scratch. The first new James Bond game in 14 years, First Light finds the Hitman maker recreating a familiar fantasy while also putting its unique spin on it. The result is a game that prioritizes story over immersive sandbox hijinks and gives us a younger version of Bond for the year 2026. 

During a recent hands-on preview in Los Angeles, I sat down with narrative director Martin Emborg and talked about Bond’s legacy and how he’s been adapted to fit more modern sensibilities, while also learning that Lennie Kravitz’s Bawma is in fact not the main villain of the game. But before we get to that, I was curious if there was any friction between trying to tell a good story and maintaining engaging gameplay.

007 First Light is a narrative-heavy adventure with plenty of frenetic gameplay to immerse yourself in. To deliver the exact Bond experience the team wanted, the game had to be narratively driven rather than an emergent sandbox like IO Interactive’s previous Hitman games. 

“[I]t had to be that [Bond’s] always up against the next most important thing,” Emborg says. “That was very clear from the beginning. I think that’s also one of the chief differences from Hitman is that [Agent 47] is a man of patience, the grim reaper waits, and for Bond, he doesn’t have that patience. He’s gonna go and stop the thing or he’s gonna go and find the guy to get to the next stage of his winning. And so there’s a lot more momentum generally. But we still offer you what we’ve called ‘creative approach,’ which is like ‘how do you want to do that?’ or ‘what do you think is the most efficient way of solving this problem?’” 

IO Interactive

That concept of “creative approach” was the foundation on which the game was built. Essentially, every level has multiple ways to achieve Bond’s objective or reach the next narrative beat in the game. But none of those choices will have consequences for the story. Player agency is meant to drive how Bond interacts with the world while not conflicting with the story First Light is trying to deliver to players. 

I ask Emborg what goes into crafting an iconic Bond villain, citing Lenny Kravitz’s pirate king Bawma, whose presence in the game was revealed during last year’s Game Awards. 

“You have your various kind[s] of Bond villains,” he then smiles. “[A]nd you said he’s ‘the next big Bond villain,’ he’s actually a villain, not necessarily the villain. But he’s someone who’s larger than life obviously. Emborg continues, “Being able to have Lenny Kravitz come in and lend his talents and embody this guy certainly makes him larger than life out of the box. But Bawma’s great because he’s someone where, in Aleph as this coastal shipbreaking town is called, that’s him, you’re in his house. When you’re there there’s nothing that goes on that he doesn’t know. So it’s this extremely dangerous place.”  

IO Interactive previously hinted that Kravitz’s Bawma is seen by the team as a complicated and nuanced character. I was curious if the way Kravitz approached his character, as well as actor Patrick Gibson’s version of Bond, led to any on-the-fly changes in how the development team wanted to present these two characters. 

“Definitely. The process of finding our Bond, [Patrick] was a big part of that,” Emborg explains, affectionately referring to the Irish actor as Patty. “The way that he would make some stuff work where we were like ‘this is not gonna fly,’ then he would absolutely make it work. And then some other times it would be like, this feels like [we’re] trying too hard. And that’s the balance you need to find.”

He continues, “How do you write Bond? We found that less is actually more most of the time. The universe of James Bond is this elevated place where there’s a lot of stuff happening between the lines. Every conversation is loaded. Usually, it’s conversations between very smart people. And there’s an interesting vibe to get right there. That chiefly speaks to dramatic scenes. But then there’s the banter between him and Moneypenny (Kiera Lester), where there’s a lot more levity, there’s a lot more fun. And so that dynamic going back and forth between those two gives it a good narrative momentum. It’s very entertaining.” 

IO Interactive

We’ve seen many iterations of the Fleming’s spy icon over the years across different mediums, but as an origin story, IO Interactive is in the unique position to reboot the character in bigger ways. I ask Emborg what sets the studio’s interpretation of Bond apart from what we’ve seen in the past. The main factors? Age and inexperience.

“He’s a lot more chatty. He’s younger as well, so he’s more open in a way,” Emborg says. “He has all the building blocks, but he hasn’t been through the wringer yet, so he’s not cold, he’s not weaponized. His charms are honest, whereas I think for a seasoned Bond, it’s manipulation. So these are things that he’ll learn, and these are things that he’ll be exposed to in various ways. But the fun thing when crafting this story and this character is that we all know where he’ll end up. He doesn’t know that, so there’s an interesting ‘we know more than he does, and we know what he’s gonna get into’ [mindset], which loads everything with both an elated sense of anticipation, but there’s also a gravity in his future. There’s stuff that he’ll have to go through to become Bond that isn’t gonna be fun at all.”

Emborg lets out a laugh. “For him.”

The narrative director was asked in an interview last year about some of the misogyny baked into a character with a reputation for treating women as disposable sex objects. “We reflect modern values,” Emborg said at the time, suggesting a more enlightened interpretation of the spy. I asked if he could explain a bit more about what modern means to him in this context. 

“He’s a very sexy guy, he’s very confident,” Emborg says. “Like even on his worst days he has more game than your average gamer, just to get that straight. He doesn’t smoke cigars; he’s 26 years old in 2026, so as with all of the other Bonds, he exists in the now.”

Bond has a history with some of the most fantastical and over-the-top gadgetry, but since most of this hardware was imagined by Fleming in the late ‘50s and throughout the ‘60s, I wanted to know what sort of challenges there were when building up Bond’s tech in First Light in a way that calls back to these gadgets, and how they’ve outfitted his arsenal in a way that makes sense for a Bond who lives “in the now.” 

Emborg notes that there’s a certain romance to Bond’s iconic gadgets, and being able to weaponize a camera, a lighter, or even a pen is intrinsically cool. “I think the big challenge for gadgets was that because they need to be systemic, we want the players to have fun with them, we don’t want it to be so that when you finally arrive at the time when you get to use your little thing, and you press X, and he uses it, that’s no fun,” he says. “Bond isn’t someone who uses gadgets all the time; someone like Batman will use gadgets all the time, but Bond is not defined by gadgets in that way, so it was about finding a balance where it’s a tool, it’s an ace up your sleeve.

The narrative director continues, “But it doesn’t take over and become overrepresented. So that was a challenge, and to some extent having these two resources to mix up your game a little bit, where you have the electric and chemical hacks [referring to the Q-Lens Bond uses throughout the game to survey his surroundings and deploy his various gadgets]. We invite you to try and play in different ways, we have a very rich game. The spectrum of what you can do at any given time is quite large. So that was part of making for a varied experience.”