For the last 25 years, developer IO Interactive has been known primarily for the lauded Hitman franchise. In that series, players take control of Agent 47, a blank-slate killing machine who travels the world to hunt down targets and take them out in ways that either look like an accident or are untraceable back to him. The series, particularly the World of Assassination trilogy, saw IO Interactive reach new heights, delivering some of the most engaging sandbox stealth experiences the medium has ever seen.
Though markedly different experiences, many of the skills that IO developed transferred to the development of 007 First Light. However, IO Interactive CEO and 007 First Light game director Hakan Abrak credits Hitman with helping to establish the studio’s identity. “It’s defined many things for us throughout the years, from the technology we’ve been doing to the communities we’ve built,” IO Interactive CEO and 007 First Light game director Hakan Abrak says. “When it comes to creating a spy or agent fantasy that travels the world – the globetrotting, contemporary world fantasy – we have spent a lot of hours traversing in that area, which, I think, has given us a certain expertise and know-how over the years.”
That very DNA influenced the direction IO Interactive took with 007 First Light, informing the studio’s approach to the more open-ended sequences of the game. “Whenever we can, we try to open it up; in the gameplay trailer, you have to infiltrate this chateau,” narrative and cinematic director Martin Emborg says. “This is where we try to bring that IOI DNA that we have from Hitman, where you represent it as a way where there are different paths into this chateau, and then you have to go from here. And then, we have the Kensington level, where we have several segments, especially going through the trespassing segments where combat is involved, where you have a much wider range of choice: You can go stealthy or you can go combat, or anything in between. It’s actually up to you, and all these routes or play-style choices should all be viable and fun to use.”
However, even with Hitman’s influence and DNA permeating 007 First Light, they still look, flow, and play completely different. “Obviously, we’ve had a lot of learnings from our Hitman titles, especially because we knew we also wanted to have some kind of stealth in this game,” gameplay director Andreas Krogh says. “It was very obvious for us to just say, ‘Okay, we have a stealth loop in Hitman, and a way of approaching that with environment interactions and the moment-to-moment, second-to-second gameplay that we like and saw users like.’ It was obvious for us to bring that to the table. But on the other hand, we knew we had a new game here, with a new protagonist that we knew we had to do some of the areas we weren’t good at in Hitman.”
In addition to the structure being much more linear, with a combination of set-piece action moments and sandbox creativity sequences, in the Hitman games, there is no driving, and combat is often a last resort if you’re made by the enemies. In 007 First Light, you’ll be expected to embody all parts of Bond’s persona, including his expert driving ability and skilled bravery within the chaos of a firefight.
“There’s obviously experience from [Kane & Lynch and Freedom Fighters], but there are certain things where, you know, new blood, new talent to IO from the outside,” Abrak says. “There are things that we’re really, really good at, and there are things where we had to get new expertise that helped develop our engine, our technology, and our game features to deliver above the benchmark for an action game, because Hitman does give you the freedom to go guns blazing. However, even though we give you that freedom, […] the full experience in Hitman is premeditated; you’re planning, you’re observing, it’s not impulsive, necessarily. It’s very thoughtful with pre-planning that goes into that, understanding the wants and motivations, the patrolling patterns, and where the different opportunities are before you make your move for a perfect execution and getaway. Bond is different.”
For 007 First Light, IO Interactive wanted to establish a consistent forward momentum for players. “An important difference is that in Bond, we are striving to do forward momentum gameplay all the time, both in combat and in stealth,” Krogh says. “Where in Hitman, we had some setups where we wanted you to use some time to stake out the situation and maybe poke a little bit at it to see what happens. In Bond, you can use time to observe a situation, but it’s very evident there are options you can use right away, and you can just use them and see what happens and come forward. We want to reduce that decision-making time to always keep moving forward and be a little bit faster.”
And then there’s the driving sequences, which are unlike anything IO Interactive has ever released. In my time watching a live demo of an intense driving sequence, I was surprised by how smooth the controls look – way more smooth than you might expect from a studio with seemingly no experience with driving mechanics. “It’s true that we haven’t released any game with driving and vehicles,” Abrak says. ‘However, we’ve done numerous IPs, and luckily, a lot of them saw the light of day. Some of them haven’t, and some of the prototypes… we always have incubation going on in IO Interactive, and in some of the incubation groups we’ve done vehicles and driving. With that said, getting that from prototype into a fully finished game, it’s a long journey. We also spent almost six and a half years on 007 now, so it’s a great amount of effort going into creating these vehicles, their behavior, their physics.”
On top of that, Bond has a much more prominent personality, which, from what I saw, is performed admirably by actor Patrick Gibson. “There are a lot of good things going for us, going from Hitman, but I will say in the same breath that retraining your brain creatively from doing an agent that is an antihero, Agent 47, to create a fantasy that is a hero, and is a charming, talkative one, to the audience, to the player, that has a completely different demeanor and way about him. That has been the creative challenge that we had to crack.”
From everything I’ve seen, IO Interactive has risen to the occasion with its transition from the Hitman: World of Assassination trilogy to the superspy action of a James Bond game. However, we won’t know for sure until we get ahold of the final product when it arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, and PC on May 27.