![]() It’s that philosophy that makes IO the dream team for a James Bond game. Can you drop that chandelier on the target? Is it possible to disguise yourself as a waiter and poison their drink? If all else fails, what are the odds you can store a cache of weapons in just the right spot and use them to blast your way to the exit? Whereas even some of the best stealth games of all time rely on avoiding danger, Hitman is more about flirting with danger in such a way that it never even realizes you were the operative until you’ve sidestepped it. Hitman games (especially the modern entries) are all about exploring the possibilities. How did they pull that off? There’s no one quality that makes the Hitman games succeed where others have failed, but the one thing that IO does better than almost anyone is find ways to make stealth in video games feel like an opportunity rather than a punishment. With the Hitman franchise, they’ve proven that they’re one of the few modern studios that seem to have figured out how to make c ompelling stealth-based experiences exciting at a time when so many major developers have all but abandoned the genre. I’ll never say that GoldenEye 007 should have been anything more than the revolutionary FPS that it was, but there’s a part of me that can’t help but feel robbed that a developer never looked at Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell and thought “Something like that, but with James Bond.” If they did, then they certainly never got the chance to make it. Maybe there was a time when the limitations of video game technology essentially forced developers to make more action-heavy Bond titles, but we should be well beyond that point now. Being a spy is very much part of Bond’s resume, but it’s the aspect of the character that has often been pushed aside in the films and often downright ignored in games. I wonder what would have happened if George Lazenby’s more measured version of the character hadn’t been replaced with the wacky Roger Moore era and the action-focused adventures of Timothy Dalton. You could make the argument that Bond was originally written to be that “blunt instrument” that Dame Judi Dench so callously referred to him as in Casino Royale, but I can’t help but think back on how Sean Connery’s Bond used underground passages and hidden contacts more than a gun in arguably the best Bond movie ever, From Russia With Love. On paper, there’s no studio better equipped to do James Bond justice. That’s not just a better case scenario: it’s the best-case scenario. Instead, IO Interactive secured the rights to the franchise. ![]() ![]() If you had told me that Activision was producing another Bond game, I’d have rolled my eyes and made peace with being modestly happy to play it on Game Pass one day. ![]() That’s what makes this announcement so exciting. ![]() Its failure to do so was the sadly appropriate end of Activision’s run with the James Bone license which failed to produce a single title that felt worthy of legendary Bond games such as GoldenEye 007, Everything or Nothing, or the late Sean Connery’s farewell to the Bond franchise, From Russia With Love. If you’re wondering why it feels like it’s been even longer than that, it’s probably because 2012’s 007 Legends was a poor attempt at not only recapturing the glory days of Bond himself (its gimmick was that you got to play as every major film version of Bond) but the glory days of Bond video games. It has been eight long years since the release of the last James Bond game. ![]()
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