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After the largest event in British films this year, the unveiling of Blond Bond, a shudder thunders through the gaming industry as one of the biggest licences in FPS changes hands. Bond will return, as most of the movies taunt. With the release of the 21st Bond film the release of the 21st Bond Game(1) drifts ever closer. And surely now EA will play a decent hand…except, EA are no more in the Bond business. This time the turn goes to Activision. Will they, like EA on so many occasions, call a bluff, or will we finally have a Bond game worthy of (whisper it) Goldeneye.
Activision, as you will know, are no newcomers to the shooting industry in gaming. While being responsible for 50% of gun crime in America(2), the FPS industry has also generated a fair bit of cash for Activision, makers of the esteemed Quake and Doom series. So with all this FPS experience, surely we have nothing to fear in the mucking up of our beloved Bond series. Well, that would be true, had they not given to Treyarch.
Web of Glory
All cynicism aside, let us not forget that when Goldeneye was made the developers had no FPS experience. Even Rare had no experience, at least this time Activision still have a fair bit.
The makers will no doubt look to the latest Bond film to give them inspiration for their exploit. It will be highly surprising if they do not use Daniel Craig’s likeness, the only recent Bond game not to was Agent Under Fire, which had the highly suspicious Pierce Brosnan look-alike. Like EA they may also employ actors to star in the stereotypical bad guy, bad girl and good girl roles. In the next-gen-o-vision of Xbox 360 and PS3 you can expect to see Blond Bond with at least 20 more pixels making up his face.
Gameplay wise, it surely has to be business as usually on Xbox 360 and PS3. If Wii merits and invitation it will probably opt for the gun and nunchuk combo. The real problem here is how do you make a good Bond game? Now with EA off the reigns, it should at least be playable.
Everything not Nothing
Ok, maybe I am being a bit harsh. If at minimum all of EA’s efforts were playable, they did at least have moments of cleverness. All of them included a solid set of 10+ missions sneaking around bases and dinner parties, all very Bondian. AUF had a few more military bases then was necessary, but it was all very solid. NF expanded with some nice graphical touches and a few new routes. Then Goldeneye: Rogue Agent decided to get some guy with a Golden eye (geddit?) go up against MI6, which was at the very least a nice idea.
Everything or Nothing and From Russia With Love? I would prefer to forget those two. Largely this is because I have never played the second one and playing Everything or Nothing clearly had such a traumatic impact on my memory my brain deleted it to prevent me having to seek psychological help.
I do remember one thing though; all of the Bond games were predictable as going over the top of a trench during World War One. Sure they all had all the Bond features that Goldeneye was perhaps a bit lacking on, but they also appeared to forget that they were supposed to be videogames, not interactive movies. This lead to all sorts of boring walks down corridors shooting guards who were standing in the same place again and again. Goldeneye had similar parts, but also benefited from the stupidity of guards causing glitches in the “guard patterns” which usually ended up with you jumping round the corner firing off a round of bullets only to realise the guard is standing behind you. Shooting you. In the head. With a Magnum.
Actually that’s a lie. Anyone knows you can only get a Magnum in story mode by killing Natalya in Jungle. This does bring us nicely to perhaps the most important element of an FPS – The Guns. Goldeneye is without a doubt the most balanced weapon set I have seen in my entire career of gaming. Perfect Dark came pretty close and was probably slightly bettered by the Timesplitters series, but compared to the James Bond EA series it was the Holy Grail of gun sets.
Taking the most powerful gun in Goldeneye, the RC-P90. For one thing this gun is legendary amongst N64 gamers as being the bullet guzzler of choice. If someone found this gun in multiplayer they had almost certainly won. Except that is, if a player of superior skill came at them with a more mid range machine gun such as the Soviet rifle (or the AK-47 in real life). They would stand a chance. Or even better, if a Goldeneye expert came at them with the single shot PP7 (or PPK). In an EA Bond game the player would have no chance, but in Goldeneye anything was possible.
A View to a Thrill
So while the guns need to be balanced, the locations can be the opposite. Military installations are boring, you rarely see Bond going into them in the films anyway. What is really needed is exotic locations, Far Cry would be a good example of this. However while EA’s Bond games had the exotic locations, they still fell down as the levels were boring as hell. Why? Goldeneye was bland in comparison, yet all those levels maintained the same thrill.
What the developers have to remember is that it is not just the cosmetics that make levels great. There is probably a more scientific term for this, but it is more important how a level plays then how it looks. Goldeneye excelled in that it had the narrow corridor shooting of Silo based alongside the open plains of Siberia. It was the difference to how levels felt that made them great.
Now we have to turn to a factor that unbelievably Goldeneye failed on. Driving is now a big part of Bond games, and in the EA versions it was often the best part of the game (which certainly says something about the shooting, a minor minigames should not be better then the main game, no matter how good it is). In Goldeneye Streets was the worst level, a shoddy drive around some bland streets in Russia(3). Abysmal. A few words could be said for limits in technology, but seeing as the equivalent part of the film was one of the highlights surely they could have made something more glamorous.
Bond games should have car scenes; the films are famous for them. EA have made some good progress in this area, and if nothing else Activision should take some tips from those games.
Gadgets on the other hand, are something no one knows what to do with. Wii will be well equipped to deliver some clever puzzles, but how to implement them into an FPS is another matter. For the most part using gadgets has been restricted to pressing a button near a door to open it. Jet pacs are quite fun to use, and the grapple from AUF represents some fine work from EA. However you only used them next to a panel which activated the voice of Q or M to tell you what to do. On that basis I could be a secret agent.
So to make a path away from traditional FPSs I will present for your inspection Hitman 2. Here is a fine example of how dropping a man into a building with the right equipment and letting him experiment delivers a delicious slice of stealth pie, coupled with the satisfaction of you doing the spying. Or assassinating in this case, but then again what is the difference?
Off Her Majesty’s Secret Service
If Activision manage all that they will deserve a round of applause. They will have made a very good game. A great game, on the other hand is something far more hard to write an instruction for. I’ll give it a try though.
To start go to http://goldeneye.detstar.com and look at the navbar. Just look at it! Sad? Guy needs a social life? I won’t deny that the guy has spent an unhealthy amount of time on the site, but if you look at the material he had to work with then it is not surprising. Goldeneye was flawed. That’s what gave it soul. That’s what kept it alive for all these years. Forget the secret missions and the multiplayer. They may be great additions, but taken away it would still have lasted ages, simply because of the huge amount of extra material, glitches and BETA content that was left lying around in the rush to let the game out.
Goldeneye was supposed to be a crappy film license. It turned out to be one of the greatest games of all time. That is like going to a Scofield game and then watching in awe as they beat Manchester United. Unexpected, and yet somehow inevitable at the same time.
So Activision, if you are reading this article then follow what I have said. Make the weapon sets balanced. Put in some exotic locations, but change the way the levels play at the same time. Get some nice driving levels. Leave in some BETA content and dead ends to have us mumbling to ourselves for seven years after the release of the game, and then when that is all well and done, make the best multiplayer possible, put in a good selection of unlockable cheats and secret missions. And stick the game online. Then you will have a proper Bond game. He will have returned. 10 years after he was last seen.
1 Not including the handheld editions.
2 Note: Bullshit.
3 And for the love of God, where is the snow?
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