"It started to feel like there wasn't any stealth": 007 First Light had to pull Bond's punches to protect IO Interactive's specialty sneaking

While it’s not a series of truly Hitman-scale murder sandboxes, 007 First Light does make good on its promise of enabling multiple Bond, James Bonding disciplines: shooting, sneaking, punching, and my personal favourite, getting immediately discovered then bullshitting something about being a door technician for supervillain lairs. But, were it not for some rejigging work on IO Interactive’s part, First Light might well have ended up with an undue preference for the brawling, bloody, Daniel-Craig-in-a-bathroom approach.

That’s according to senior combat designer Tom Marcham, whom I briefly interrogated at a taping of the UKIE’s For One Night Only showcase. Marcham says that although there “was always the idea that [First Light] was going to be this kind of flexible blend” of secret agent styles, in the crucible of active development, the strength of straight up henchman-punching repeatedly threatened to wallop the stealth and social aspects into irrelevance.

"There's been different times where in development, the the combat got a bit too overpowered, and then the stealth would go away for a little while because it would be too easy to fight your way through," he explained. "And then we'd have to find different ways to challenge the player. So there were a couple of times in development where it started to feel like there wasn't any stealth element in the game.

"And then we had to kind of bring it back, and tone... or not tone, but balance it to make sure that you know your first resort isn't always - unless you want it to be - going up and punching someone. To get it so that all of those options are interesting and balanced. That kind of went up and down throughout development."

I found this anecdote amusing on two levels. One, can you imagine such an obviously Hitman-influenced IO game making an afterthought of the stealth? They’d have furious, freshly head-waxed Agent 47 superfans clambering the drainpipes of their Copenhagen HQ like vengeful, hairless squirrels. And two, it reminds me of how very much un-overpowered the fistfight combat is in the finished game. I recall ghosting through the opening hour (including its excellent, if intentionally misdirecting tutorial) with fully 007-like efficacy, before getting beaten into unconsciousness by some drunk bloke in a nightclub toilet. The best Bond game ever? I don’t know, but I’m definitely not the best Bond.

Marcham didn’t have a license to spill the beans on First Light’s upcoming story DLC, nor further details on its first post-release gadget addition, a pair of AR glasses based on the real-life Even G2. Though I did at least learn that the brands involved in the game’s product placement dabbling tend to be fairly unbothered by how you misuse and abuse their wares in-game. Surely such knowledge will be of comfort to Mark, who spent about nine hours deciding on an Omega watch strap before almost immediately ditching it inside a crashing plane.