I don’t like video game tutorials. They’re important, don’t get me wrong – I’d rather be told how to play a game than stumble through a complex control scheme – but it always feels like a chore. It is remarkable, then, that I can’t stop thinking about a tutorial montage in the early moments of 007 First Light. It’s one of the most engaging and effective tutorials I’ve ever played, and it’s all thanks to what it pulls from popular action movies.
The scene in question comes when Bond is thrust into training camp with other trainees in the 00 program. For reasons I won’t spoil, Bond joins late, skipping the earlier parts of the training that others had to suffer through. To catch him up to speed (and as a sort of punishment), the leader of the program tells two other recruits that they’ve only got two weeks to get Bond ready for his basic tests. It’s a trial by fire, a movie trope I quite enjoy, and by taking cues from a different medium, IO Interactive makes a surprisingly exciting sequence.
Bond learns to climb, drive, shoot, and fight in rapid succession, with each tutorial quickly cutting to the next. A fellow trainee hands you a gun and challenges you to shoot three targets. The second your bullet hits the third, the game jumps forward in time. Now, you’re in a car speeding through a training course. The second you cross the finish line, the camera cuts over to a push-up sequence, then an obstacle course, and then a wrestling ring, where you learn to counter punches. The montage continues bouncing around until you’ve learned all the controls for each of these sections, which takes about nine minutes.
There are a few reasons why this works so well. First, chopping up activities you’ve done a million times in other games keeps them feeling novel. You don’t learn every part of the driving control scheme at once, instead returning to that section every fourth tutorial or so, implying that time has passed and Bond, like you, is improving. And the pace is refreshingly relentless. I know how to aim a gun in a video game, so I don’t need a tutorial on shooting, but it’s still exciting to drop into a scene, hit five targets in rapid succession, and immediately jump out.
It helps that the tutorial is also diegetic, meaning the montage is real to both the player and the character. I often prefer a non-diegetic tutorial, typically communicated by on-screen text when you first take control of a character. Most games have this – when you come out of a cutscene, you’ll get a pop-up that says “use the left stick to move,” and when you get to a gap, it says, “press A to jump.” On the other hand, diegetic tutorials usually happen when another character tells you what to do, often disguised with in-world lingo. I usually like this less, because threading the instructions into dialogue takes a bit more work and makes the whole process take longer. 007 First Light is a great exception, however, and presents the speed of the former method with the narrative justification of the latter.
Most importantly, the diegetic approach puts the player in James Bond’s shoes. It’s ultimately why we want to play games based on our favorite characters – it’s fun to do the things they do, to feel like we’ve accomplished the over-the-top stunts they pull off. This is the moment in the game I’ve felt the most like Bond, because we were both learning and trying to prove ourselves to the other people in the camp in near-equal measure.
The final reason it’s so cool is that it’s the exact sort of training montage you’d find in an action movie, but that begs another question: why are training montages so fun in action movies? It’s simple: because it condenses the buildup to make room for the most exciting moments.
Action movies, like 007 First Light, have priorities. As much as I need character development and moving performances, I come to action movies for the huge set pieces and explosions you see in the trailers. Everything else in the screenplay functions to make those big moments as fun, intense, and satisfying as possible. For example, it’s important that we see what happens to John Wick’s dog at the start of the story, but in the realm of the action movie, it’s all about getting audiences emotionally invested for the next few hours, when he mows down enemies with fast-paced gun fu.
IO Interactive understands that I, the player, need to be told which buttons allow me to counter a punch or throw an opponent. It also understands that I didn’t boot up the game to learn: I booted it up to play. It wants to literally cut to the chase – to cut away from the training and head right to the high-octane car chases. 007 First Light respects my time and knows what I want in a way I’ve never seen a game do before. And after playing it, I hope to see other developers follow suit.
For more 007 First Light, stay tuned for our review of the game, which will drop in the coming days. In the meantime, you can learn about the game’s development by reading our exclusive cover story coverage from earlier this year right here.