If live-service games have a million haters, I’m one of them. If they have one hater, it’s me. If they have zero haters, I have died. If the world is against live-service games, I am with the world. If the world is for live-service games, I am against the world. And yet, I’m kinda hoping007 First Lightturns out to be a live-service game. That’s because developer IO Interactive’sHitman World of Assassinationis not like other live-service games, so I hope First Light won’t be either.
IO’s James Bond game resurfaced this weekand, though we don’t know much about how it will follow in the footsteps of its bald older brother, I’m hoping it borrows World of Assassination’s platform-based approach.Summer Game Festis kicking into gear in a few days, so we’ll know for sure when the game gets its proper reveal sometime this week.
Here’s How Hitman Hooked This Hater
The modern Hitman trilogy is the only live-service to ever captivate me. I’ve loved other games as a service —Halo Infinitewas one of my favorites of 2021 — but I don’t like the model. I like playing single-player games, I don’t want to play with other people most of the time, I don’t want to see good studios likeSuicide SquaddeveloperRocksteadymake worse games to chase trends, and I don’t want to see perfectly good games and studios Thanos-snapped out of existence because they didn’t hit some opaque metric as fast as the publisher expected.
But I have to admit Hitman is better for having a live-service model. That’s because, unlike most live-service titles, Hitman is just a single-player game. The things that I don’t like about games as a service aren’t issues for Hitman. I don’t like playing games as a service because they’re typically designed for multiplayer and I prefer to play on my own.
Instead of cosmetics locked behind microtransactions, IO adds new missions, targets, and weapons to its existing maps on a regular basis. This means that every time you log on, there’s a new take on a familiar level for you to attempt. Rather than needing to grind 100 kills to max out your battle pass and get your hands on someStar Wars-branded back bling, Hitman is constantly shifting and always feels fresh, without the FOMO.
007 First Light Should Bring That Model Back
But the live-service model allowed Hitman to be more than just an excellent single-player game. Each entry was complete on its own, but as the series progressed, the platform model allowed players to build a huge library of levels they could revisit, often with new DLC additions.
When I got intoHitman with 3, I actually already owned the previous games — one digitally through a giveaway, and the other because I got it on disc for Christmas. So, I was able to go back and play three games in one place, which was extremely convenient. Progress from all three games counting toward my XP total was great encouragement to try all those old maps.
It also meant that IO could easily add new stuff, not just to the latest game, but to the whole trilogy. It often did this, dropping seasonal content for maps that were several years old at that point. New missions, new costumes, new weapons and, best of all, new objectives. WhenIO added its roguelike mode Freelancer, World of Assassination’s structure had the added benefit of being able to include all three games’ maps and hop between them with ease.
It might be getting ahead of ourselves to assume that 007 First Light will be the beginning of a new trilogy for IO, and it also might be too much to assume that it will be similar enough to Hitman to warrant the same structure. First Light’s maps might have more in common with the linear Carpathian Mountains epilogue that closed out Hitman 3 than they do with the open-ended levels the series was known for. We just don’t know yet.
James Bond, like Hitman, is a perfect match for intricate, level-based designs. Bond has more varied objectives than merely assassinating targets, but he shares Agent 47’s mission-driven job description. He goes into a place, accomplishes a goal, then gets out. This kind of gameplay is perfect for a live game that can be updated over time. IO can add new locations, new goals, and new wrinkles that make the exfiltration process trickier. Building 007 First Light as a platform would mean building runway for the game to continue to get bigger and better for years to come.
I don’t know yet what the game will look like. It may take an entirely new approach, dropping Bond into more linear levels or a full-on open world. But if 007 First Lightisa continuation of what IO accomplished with World of Assassination’s design, I hope it continues its release model, too.
