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

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. Daniel Craig as 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. Bond attends a gala in 007 First Light. 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 goin