How do you make James Bond the video game character feel like James Bond the movie character?
That was the question I posed several different ways to Garrett Young, the executive producer of this fall's first-person game "Quantum of Solace," during a phone interview earlier this week. For instance...
- How do you make sure he doesn't shoot so many people that he no longer seems like a suave super-spy?
- How do you make the player feel like a ladies' man?
Well, it starts with making sure the developers adhere to the first official Bond commandment, the first item on a four-page document that Young was shown by the series' franchise-owners so that he could know what is Bond and what isn't.
"The first big one is 'Bond's greatest weapon is his mind,'" Young told me, referring to the first edict in what he calls the "Bond Bible." This first fundamental principle, he had learned, was that "Bond is always outmanned, always outgunned and he always has to use his mind to get out of certain situations."
"Bond is always outmanned, always outgunned."
For the "Quantum of Solace" game, which will cover the movie of the same name as well as 2006's "Casino Royale," the thinking aspect of Bond will be represented by player choice. Young said gamers will be able to choose tactics for some of the game's levels, opting for stealth instead of charging in with a machine gun.
But isn't that the challenge with Bond games: that James Bond the video game character is more of a shoot-em-up action hero than he ever is in the movies?
This is the difference between action movies and action games, Young said: "A movie that's an action movie is still not 100 percent action. The pacing allows it to not always be action." In an action game, however, he believes the player is usually looking for constant engagement with game, perpetual action. "There are some games that do 30-minute conversations," he acknowledged. "That's not our game." Keeping Bond from being seen as suddenly gun-crazy, the developers have chosen are some action scenes that aren't full of shooting, like the parkour chase scene from "Casino Royale."
Inevitably, though, the James Bond of the new video game will be a more avid shooter than the one in the movies. Will he be as much a flirt and a ladies' man? Young pointed out that the new Daniel Craig Bond isn't quite the romancer that the Roger Moore one was. He said an older, apparently no longer official, Bond Bible advised that Bond romances two to three women per adventure. Not anymore. So the pressure's off to bring that aspect of Bond into the game in a big way.
"We couldn't think of any good mini-games, any make-out games."
Still, there's got to be some romance in a Bond adventure, even in a video game, no? "We're not getting deep into that," Young said. "That was something we talked about, but how do we bring that to life? We felt that would be too story-driven [than we wanted], not enough gamer-with-controller-in-hand [and too much] gamer-with-controller-on-table." And an added joke (we hope!): "We couldn't think of any good mini-games, any make-out games."
A few more things to note about this Bond: The Bond of the newer movies and this new game is "a more believable, dangerous hands-on Bond," Young said. The new game will feature Bond taking cover, using a third-person cover system added to a modified version of the "Call of Duty 4" engine. It won't feature driving missions. And, like the Daniel Craig movies, it will have fewer goofy gadgets than older Bond games (but more than will be in the new film).
The lead development studio for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of game, Treyarch, has 90 people working on it -- a team comprised of a mix of movie-game veterans and first-person shooter developers. It does not include members of previous "Bond" development teams (past games were published by EA and Nintendo).
"Quantum of Solace" is set to be released for all major gaming platforms during the same timeframe as the movie later this year. And don't worry about the sometimes-harmful need to release the game at the same time as the movie, Young said. "I don't have those concerns," he said. "We're not trying to focus on everything and the kitchen sink. The first thing is it's got to be a really fun experience."
And it's got to feel like Bond.
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