Tijdens gamescom kregen wij al een vroege uitgebreide blik op 007 First Light, naast een gameplay presentatie konden we ook twee kernleden van het development team spreken. In dit interview voelen we Rasmus Paulsen, de Franchise Art Director. Met hem kijken we onder andere naar bepaalde artistieke keuzes die er hier gemaakt zijn en of er beperkingen waren vanaf Amazon/MGM voor zijn visie. Het andere interview wat met Theuns Smit, de Senior Licensing Producer. Deze vind je hier.
DN: Could you maybe start with telling us a bit about yourself, your history in the games industry and your current role.
RP:All right. My name is Rasmus Poulsen, I’m the Franchise Art Director at 007 First Light, and I’ve been with IO Interactive on and off for 15 years, so a for a long time.
DN: As you have been at IO Interactive, have you been a part of this team from the beginning?
RP: Yes, I’ve been part of the initial pitches, and yeah, exactly.
DN: Okay. As IO Interactive mostly worked on Hitman in recent memory, how was it to start working on something that is licensed instead of your own IP.
RP: Yeah, good question, you know, we approached MGM with the idea of doing this, because we agreed with the internet at the time that we were would be good candidates to do it. And I mean, having been inspired by double o seven in general, for my own career personally throughout the years, it was a natural step. So yeah, you know, it felt like a good idea all around. So I think it’s been a supportive journey where we’ve been trying to ensure that we simply make the best experience for you guys the gamers.
DN: How did you go about creating this the visual identity of this specific Bond, like we have seen so many different kinds of Bonds over the years, and of course, you talked about pitching. So it must have had some iterations over the years.
RP: Absolutely, you know, one of the things that one of the things that we think is important is of course, to look at the wider IP in the 60 years of legacy, so we’ve certainly analyzed both the character and the esthetics throughout the franchise. What stood up to us was that it’s both about elegance and timelessness and cool. At the same time, it’s about adventure and excitement and action and over the top good times and these two forces have to combine into that experience and that goes for the esthetics as well, where it is both about credibility, you know, good script, good character rationale. Foundating abilitiesso that you can allow yourself to go on this adventure with us and with your new friend James Bond.
DN: For this, you work with a license holder. Did you get many restrictions from them creating this Bond?
RP: People ask about restrictions and the funny thing about that word is, when you work with creativity restrictions are everywhere, so I like to see it as it sounds like a dirty word, but it’s not really because without restrictions, everything is everything, which means nothing is nothing. I know. That sounds a bit weird, but my point is, without discussions, that might feel like restrictions to some, you won’t get to have the good debate of what you’re trying to achieve and with that in mind, you know, we’ve had good discussions with them, MGM, for a long time about everything from character and bringing this new young Bond on to you guys the gamers in particular.
As well as with, you know, Omega, Asthma etc. to make sure that we come with the best experience possible, and of course, in terms of licensed products and everything in terms of that whole universe, it’s important to us that we represent Bond as you would expect it.
DN: I am not very deep into James Bond history, but I don’t think we have had a young Bond in any of the books, movies and definitely not in the era in time First Light is in. How hard was it to create it, and think of something like that, because you don’t have any or very little reference material of that period of Bond’s life.
RP: So like I said, before we were looking at the whole franchise, we did a thorough character analysis of the character, and we found Bond to be uniquely front foot. The British wit and charm, of course, a man of action and a man of action that will finish the mission no matter what. And these are the core traits of Bond, and they’re expressed in different ways, and then in that sense, we made sure that our Bond had that, but at the same time that as he’s stepping into this world of espionage with you, the player. You are both getting to learn a little bit about what shapes a young man like that on that journey.
DN: Let’s talk a bit about the showcase that has been shown to us. We saw a couple of amazing locations like the big house, the car chasing, um, what kind of diversity can we expect in this game of the locations like, normally we see both Bond around the whole world.
RP: Absolutely. It’s, you know, been a pillar for us, and I hope for a long time to do you know, globe-trotting and a bunch of diverse locations. It’s really important that we deliver on that for Bond, maybe more so than ever actually, because on the one hand it has to feel like a vacation, and on the other hand it could also be a location that you could be scared to visit so again.
This dichotomy of a good time and a dangerous time is really key to the franchise and at the same time, even when we go to a place that feels like a vacation like you saw yesterday, it’s important to build in surprises as well. This so that you will probably end up differently than where you’d expect when you start the location and that dichotomy of expectation and delivery and surprise. Is really key to the Bond experience.
DN: In the showcase, we saw Bond move from one location to another within a mission. From a mansion to a car chase for example. I don’t think that has been done with Hitman. If I remember correctly, it mostly stayed to one location for a mission. Did you have to change your way of working to create the world to account for this?
RP: Certainly for realizing this project, we’ve had to grow our expertise in many different areas among them, level design, and the things related to that, which allows us to give you this journey you just saw, where you have both a dense château, full of social opportunities, many different types of gameplay.
From social manipulation, through gadget work, through head to hand combat and then onto the car chase, which is a completely different type of layout, obviously a more linear, although still with opportunity for game features and then leading on to another larger location. So yes, certainly, we’ve had a lot of work going into the engine our proprietary D2 engine to update that to allow us to give you guys that dynamism, in approach in terms of mission design.
DN: Let’s circle back a bit about the inspiration you mentioned. About what it means to be Bond. Which of the Bonds have inspired you the most in this development?
RP: Well, I think the key phrase from Fleming’s book about his appearance, where, of course we have his scar, which is a huge thing for us and really, really fun to get to finally play with, but also the notion that he’s not traditionally handsome. Which speaks to the fact that he has to be exciting in different ways, namely behavior and his attitude, and that there’s something cool about him, right. So what was really fun about that was that it was the core that’s where everything started.
Then when you look at throughout the history of the 60 years of different versions of bond, we have humor, we have brutal action. Different bonds carry themselves differently, and we then cherry-picked a few of these elements from all the ones that we liked that we felt would serve the game and the experience and of course, a younger character. We crafted and concocted this young bond from these different limits.
DN: About the previous games from both, like most of them, were pretty much just killing. Here you’ll really have to be attacked before you can kill. So the license to kill. So the games are very different, but you also get some inspiration from games like the one from Rare, Golden Eye?
RP: Well, not aside to that it’s important for us to craft something new, but that said, of course, there are parallels. I mean, we have an Omega watch as a interface for instance, as part of the inspiration for the hub interface. So there are certainly a lot of parallels, and it was important for us to also use our catalog of skill sets in the building that we’ve used on previous outings but all in all, I think, I think we weren’t distinctly inspired by a singular thing we were looking at the IP from afar.
Like from a distance and trying to craft our own thing, because part of the excitement of this is to not assemble any singular thing or any singular point of gameplay or sort of craft that from the quilted carpet of up 60 years of a franchise, so I can’t point to a specific thing that inspired us specifically, but we looked at all of it, and you know, soaked it all in of course, in trying to craft what we feel like is a fresh take for the gamer.
DN: To round up. Hitman got a cross-over with Le Chiffre from Spectre, can we see the reverse happening as well? Like can we see a nod to Agent 47 in First Light.
RP: I don’t know anything about that.
