007 First Light finds the sweet spot to start a James Bond videogame. It's not necessarily an origin story, as Bond has already made his way into the lower levels of MI6, but it takes place early enough that IO Interactive can showcase a 007 that many may not have seen before, making this more than just a film adaptation.
"We've been so lucky with our partners that we were trusted to do more than a gamification of a movie," Hakan Abrak, CEO of IO Interactive, told me at Gamescom. "It's not about making Pierce Brosnan look as good as possible with pixels, but actually, creating this young man from scratch and with an original story. We wanted to take that opportunity and go all the way with creating something for the gamers that they could call their own."
I only got to see Bond during his first mission at Gamescom, so I can't say how his character will evolve over the course of the game, but from what I did see, he's a refreshing take on the secret agent. By that, I mean he doesn't look dead behind the eyes because he somehow got roped into making more movies than he wanted to.
"It was interesting for us to explore how things started for James Bond," Abrak continues. Instead of creating a Bond that's rough around the edges and has already had his fill of action, IO went for a less common angle, a Bond who is still "a young man with his wits and charm but with some, let's say, aspirational ideas about the world."
007 First Light may have a similar central secret agent/hitman protagonist at its core as IO's Hitman games, but that doesn't mean it's just some clone. Abrak has previously told PC Gamer that "If Hitman is a single-minded killer and basically the bad guy of the game, Bond is the hero." Which makes complete sense, especially when you see Bond in action.
My first look at IO's young Bond at Gamescom took me by surprise. Not only was Bond not at the centre of the first mission, far from it, he was the lookout/chauffeur, but he was also a lot softer and funnier than I remember from recent films.
"It's extremely important to get the humour right for Bond," Abrak says. "Humour, in our prior games like Hitman, is also extremely important—we call it our dark humour, Danish dark humour. It's important because we're making a game about an assassin, and it's pretty morbid. But it gets a bit more digestible with humour."
But a young Bond doesn't just work from a story perspective, Abrak sees it as a "fitting" way for gamers to start and "share this journey with him." Especially for those who have yet to experience James Bond in a videogame.
"I certainly hope a few people will be surprised," Abrak continues. "If we can surprise some of the audience with this take, that will be a good thing. It won't just be about a young man getting by—you'll get to experience the sharpness and the wits and the charm and all the power moments of a Bond fantasy as you progress in the story."
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