Hack And Bash: How 007 First Light Mixes High-Tech Gadgets With Old-School Brawling

2 hours ago 1

From the iconic gun-barrel sequence to his depictions in formative first-person shooters like GoldenEye, James Bond and guns have, historically, gone hand-in-hand. What's been refreshing about 007 First Light, then, is how it leans much more on physical brawling combat.

This was partly due to the game being an origin story for Bond, allowing players to see him as a young man before joining the double-0 program. "Our younger version of Bond hasn't gone cold yet, so that leant us towards this idea that the game shouldn't be where you walk into a room, see someone, and you shoot them in the back of the head," says the game's senior combat designer Tom Marcham. "We also knew that Bond is quite a direct force, and not necessarily the guy you send to sneak in entirely silently. He's very indiscrete in his methods, and more of a blunt tool that causes some destruction around him. That led us down the route of not killing but having lots of non-lethal fist-fighting."

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Marcham about First Light and how it presented new territory for IO Interactive. In IO's Hitman series, when Agent 47 is out of stealth he resorts to shooting; Marcham's prior experience at studios like Creative Assembly and Splash Damage have also been focused in the shooter genre. Not counting those who played GoldenEye with only hand-slapping, melee combat hasn't really been seen in a Bond game either, the exception being 2005's From Russia With Love, based on the Sean Connery-starring film. But for initial inspiration, the team looked towards a much more recent incarnation of Bond.

"We used similar stuff to the Daniel Craig movies, which is a mix of a boxing style based on what you might have learned if you were the kind of guy to get into a fight on the street," Marcham explains. "We had this idea that our Bond has probably got some slightly repressed anger issues from being an orphan and those would probably come out on a night out or two where he's throwing fists. Then we mixed that with the kind of military martial arts you would learn from the SAS [Special Air Services], which is fairly brutal, very effective, and professional-looking."

While Craig's Bond is arguably a colder incarnation than the fresh-faced and more heroic Bond of First Light, another aspect to the former that Marcham found interesting was his sense of vulnerability. "There is a messiness to the fight that gives us this kind of grounded element where he does get beaten down a lot and he seems very mortal in a lot of it--he's not infallible," he adds. "That ended up being an element we brought into the combat. It's very improvisational, you're using the environment, and those elements basically helped us build something quite unique."

When it came to taking inspiration from other games, the mass appeal of Bond meant that First Light needed to have "an accessible base," where the target audience would range "from hardcore gamers to someone's dad in his 60s who's probably never played a game before but just really likes Bond." So while mass blockbuster hits like Uncharted and Batman: Arkham Asylum--particularly the latter's counter-parry system--were an important template, Marcham notes that the team also examined more hardcore titles like the martial arts-based Sifu and cult favourite Sleeping Dogs. According to Marcham, Sleeping Dogs in particular was inspirational for the game's environmental takedowns, as well as Bond's ability to grab-rush enemies in close quarters.

Still, even with a brawler-first approach, where it's possible to contain the situation in the immediate vicinity before other enemies are alerted, the action can still escalate to the point where you unlock your 'license to kill' and it turns into a shooter. It was also important to have both elements working in tandem so that it didn't feel like the team was developing two games. Even then, I was rather surprised by which third-person shooter Marcham said was an inspiration.

"We actually looked at Vanquish, a movement-based shooter where you have rockets propelling from the back of your legs," he says. "While we took only a little bit, we tried to get as much of the general idea of flowing from melee to ranged combat and how that could feel."

While not as simulated-driven as Hitman: World of Assassination, there's nonetheless a lot of underlying systems in First Light that see a space transform depending on your approach. Taking too long to resolve a fistfight, for example, can lead to someone pulling out their gun and finding yourself in a sudden all-out shoot-out.

"One of my favourites is in Mauritania, in an area called Logistics B, which is a very mundane name for a very extreme space," Marcham explains. "If you play through it, you can have it play like a very long stealth encounter, but if you go into a firefight, it's suddenly this huge long-range firefight with all kinds of chaos going on."

Iterating and perfecting that switch between stealth and combat encounters was First Light's most challenging design issue. But while in a game like Hitman, escalating to hostile combat almost guarantees you'll just reload your checkpoint, it never feels like failure in First Light.

"It's been quite cool seeing a lot of YouTubers when they fail stealth and they start throwing punches--they don't seem upset when they 'fail,' they seem like they're ready to have a good time," says Marcham. "I think that was a success that we worked really hard for and I'm glad that it's gone down pretty well."

He was also especially pleased with how many of First Light's mechanics were executed in the widely praised training montage during Bond's training in Malta, which becomes more than just a tutorial but one of the game's highlights. "It was an unbelievable amount of work involved," he recalls. "The first version of it I saw was all blockout models and placeholder music, and when you played it, you were like, this is amazing. Why has no one ever done this before? And then we found out later why no one had done it before because it was incredibly difficult to do! But then we made it, and it's one of those things that when we saw it, we were like, yeah, we're making a James Bond game. And it was still just part of the tutorial."

One element that some Bond fans might lament from this more grounded version of Bond is the absence of wackier gadgets, even if you do eventually unlock the powerful missile pen. Marcham admits they did try testing a lot more gadgets in the game, but it was ultimately about finding which ones felt suitable for this world. "We had things in it that we thought were going to be cool, but when you play it, it turns out it's not cool, it just looks silly," he explains. "There was definitely a point where it felt like he'd become Mr. Gadget, and we had to tune it back."

However, Marcham doesn't rule out more gadgets making their way into First Light or other ways to leverage the depth of Bond's combat. IO Interactive has already announced a roadmap with at least a year of updates, which includes expanding on TacSim mode, a new game plus mode, as well as a story expansion featuring pirate king Bawma. "I think we'll continue to expand with ways you can replay encounters and play about with the ruleset so that we can get more out of the campaign that we have," says Marcham. "We're still messing around with the gadget side of stuff. I think there's a whole world that you can explore with who Bond is and why he uses gadgets."

There's still the Switch 2 version to come later this year, but after that, Bond's future is unclear--especially as Amazon, the current rights-holder of the Bond franchise, has hinted at becoming more involved with any potential sequels, and IO has suffered layoffs. In any case, 007 First Light's success so far surely hints of even more unlocked potential in this young, brawny Bond.

Read Entire Article