As you likely already know,IO Interactive, the studio behind the critically acclaimed and much belovedHitmangames, is making a Bond prequel titled007 First Lightthat will likely be the first part in a new trilogy.
There are lots of things that IO has proven it does incredibly well with Hitman that will translate to First Light. Hitman is one of the best stealth series of all time, especially the third installment, now known asHitman: World of Assassination. There is so much flexibility in how you complete each level that every mission is packed with replayability. NPCs are reactive to your presence and your disguises. It’s the perfect base on which to build a Bond game – just add more action and plot.
007 First Light Will Probably Have Live-Service Elements
Another thing that it might be bringing over from the Hitman games is its post-launch strategy. In an interview withThe Game Business, CEO Hakan Abrak said, “The first objective with 007 First Light is to come out with the best possible, most impactful journey for gamers”. This likely alludes to the game’s single-player campaign.
But he continued, “With Bond, we have really upped our stealth, we have really evolved the action aspects of our technology and features. Seamless combat, coming in and out of range and melee… For Hitman, it was interlocked animations, here it is freeform. We have [players] driving different exotic cars. That gives us more challenges to play with. In Hitman, you have these live challenges. And besides the things that we are able to do in Hitman, we can do more actiony things and more kinetic challenges in Bond.”
It’s not a direct answer of whether First Light will have the same live-service trappings that Hitman did, but from another quote – “We obviously have tons of experience now from World of Assassination, and tons of experience on how to extend a single-player experience by giving desirable free content to players” – it sure sounds like First Light is going to be following in Hitman’s footsteps in this sense.
Does Every IO Game Have To Do This?
I love Hitman, and I love its challenges, but the idea of First Light having a similar model strikes me as… well, icky. I can’t deny that the model has worked very well for IO so far, in that Hitman has sold consistently year on year. The gamers yearn for live-service single-player games, and it’s hard to blame them – free content is free content.
But Hitman and First Light are likely going to be very different games. While Hitman 3 did end up focusing more on its story (to mixed results), nobody isreallyplaying Hitman games for the narrative side of things. The highlight has always been the flexibility of its gameplay, which is why integrating challenges and awarding points for specific assassination methods works so well. It’s a sandbox game, and the sandbox is the point.
But Bond will likely be a more narratively-focused game with a more linearity – while missions themselves may be sandboxes, events will have to be chained so that certain things happen in a certain order. Alas, that’s just how plots work. For it to feel like a coherent gameplay experience and not a series of disjointed missions (which is what Hitman largely is), it has to have a narrower focus.
The games are also very different in tone, and experimenting with murder methods as Agent 47 will feel different from when you’re doing it as Bond.
First Light’s storyisthe point, and that makes it different. Post-launch content doesn’t extend the core appeal of the game. Single-player games that throw in live-service elements, like challenge missions and the like, rarely pull it off. Hitman is one of the few games that has, but that’s because there isn’t all that much of a campaign to dilute in the first place. They’re different games, and they need different approaches.
