Six years since IO Interactive announced its James Bond game, 007 First Light has finally come in from the cold – and despite the Hitman developer's roots, it goes beyond leaving Agent 47 to nurse a martini. The studio's well-crafted infiltration sandboxes are a focal point of 007 First Light, yes, but only in service to the greater Bond fantasy, which is built upon bigger cinematic action setpieces and a more character-driven story.
Now that the game is out, I caught up with audio director Dominic Vega and gameplay director Andras Krogh to go behind the scenes of what our 007 First Light review calls "Bond's greatest game to date".
The sound is not enough
Vega joined IO Interactive four and a half years ago. "When you hear about a project about a secret agent that's being built down the road [...] It's hard to resist that phone call," he tells me. Some of his earliest work involved finding the right sound – not just for Bond, which many games and films have already achieved, but for young Bond.
"Before I started this, I thought that the James Bond games all had the sound of this fully formed pulp character. I felt like we were dropping the needle in the middle of the movie," says Vega. "So it's like, what does the beginning of that record sound like?"
Meanwhile, Krogh examined the space between James Bond and Hitman's Agent 47, trying to work out where IO Interactive could play to its existing strengths and where it needed to be agile. "Even though you think you have a good base in a game like Hitman – he infiltrates a lot of places and Bond infiltrates a lot of places, so at least we have that going – when you actually start doing it, there are enough differences that it's not easy," Krogh explains.
"[In] Hitman, you go in and very easily end up in situations where you think of it as a puzzle that needs to be solved stealthily in some shape or form, and that slows the game down, which is good for Hitman," he adds. "But we wanted a game that was faster with more forward momentum."
Combat – a "last resort" in Hitman, says Krogh – was rebuilt from the ground-up to be a viable first approach in 007 First Light, with an improvisational feel that lets players throw whatever's on-hand at baddies and use Bond's gadgets creatively. The laser in his watch, for example, can be used to temporarily blind an enemy or blow up nearby pipes; or shear the lock off a vent to bypass the route entirely. Shooting was made more involved, departing from Hitman's aim snap to sustain 007 First Light's longer stretches of gunfights.
"We not only revolutionized, but iterated on our stealth loop," adds Krogh. He points to Situation Contained, a feature which lets players "contain" threats which will potentially blow their cover – knocking out a witness, for example, or bluffing your way through a restricted area. "You have tools to deescalate the situation and then just play on from there. That both feels like James Bond, because he's improvising whatever he's getting into, and then it's also iterating on this stealth loop where we don't stop. You create the full story as you go, instead of reloading and meta-gaming. You're playing the game without stops, which to me, is a very big personal win."
While Krogh's team honed in on how Bond moved and the way he fought, wanting players "to feel intrinsically that he's improvising everything he does," Vega continued to hone in on the sound of James Bond. "We tried to say 'Hey, don't subvert the thing that the audience came in for,'" he says. "The audience is here to hear Bond music, but hold it back because he's a young guy trying to break through."
"We didn't want it to be cartoony," Krogh continues. "We didn't want you to hear the Dr. No theme every time he takes someone out, right? IPs can go wrong sometimes when you over-synthesize something – you're kind of overpaying at the slot machine, and [nothing] has value."
The sound team taped handguns and Aston Martins, got to record their brass sectionals at London's prestigious Abbey Road Studios, and took extra days for more tracks where needed. "We just had to do it right," says Krogh, who recalls a conversation with Alexis Smith – one half of 007 First Light's composing duo The Flight. "We were sitting in Copenhagen and he was writing on a chalkboard. We were saying 'Do we need to squeeze in an extra track here? Do we need to do another day?' And he just writes in big, white, chalk: 'it's Bond' – like, yes, we have to."
The message stuck. "I don't think that Bond is something where you want to hold back," says Krogh. "You don't want to say 'I played it safe', you want to go out and say, 'Hey, this is a character that's polarized people at different points in time', and there's going to be fans who are going to see the nods and literary references and the Easter eggs, and there's going to be other people who may not."
"You want to make stuff that has a statement and has something to say, and I think everyone who was involved got that from an early date," he adds. "It's nice to see it come to a close."
