NEWS - Wednesday, July 16, 2008
E3 2008: Quantum of Solace
Danjaq’s senior vice-president of global business strategy Keith Snelgrove may have a complicated job title but his approach to handling the Bond license is relatively simple: he wants to find entertainment partners that are going to be around for a while and that share the desire to make the Bond tie-ins as faithful to the movie properties as possible. Danjaq feels that Activision is the partner he’s looking for, so much so, in fact, that they’re giving the game company the opportunity to release Quantum of Solace on the same day as the next Bond film.But since senior VPs of global business strategy aren’t great game developers, Snelgrove handed things off to a member of the development team to reveal just what the vision of the game is. The team has three main strengths that they’re hoping will make Quantum of Solace the best Bond game yet and set the pattern for numerous titles to come.
First, they have a great vision, a vision inspired by Daniel Craig’s more dangerous and physical take on James Bond. To capture the physical nature of his portrayal, the developers are working on a hybrid 1st person and 3rd person camera system. The FPS setting will be used for shooting segments and the 3PS will kick in whenever the player enters into hand-to-hand combat. Second, they have great technology, courtesy of the Call of Duty 4 engine. Third, they have a tremendous partnership with Danjaq and have access to the scripts and actors from both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.
We got to see a bit of this in action thanks to a couple of trailers. The first starts with Bond hiding in a hotel hallway, as a guard patrols back and forth. Bond sneaks up behind him and executes a very rough takedown move. The whole scene plays out in 3rd person, but once Bond gets a gun, the perspective shifts to first-person. But even with this gun, Bond still prefers to take down his opponents by sneaking up behind them and laying the smack down in third-person mode, even going so far as to toss a dude off the balcony.
Bond moves outside along the ledge of the outside of the building. He slides across a narrow platform and when he comes to a large bank of windows, the game shifts into a nice multi-panel cinematic that shows Bond on the outside and the patrolling guards inside. This way, you can see when it’s safe to move across the windows to get to the office on the other side. In the office, Bond crouches behind the desk before jumping up to lay waste to all the remaining guards with his SMG, which is strange because the gun he stole from the first guard was a pistol.
The next movie shows a scene from Quantum of Solace and has Bond traveling deep into a sewer, chasing enemies through cisterns. Along the way there are barrels aplenty to blow up. The massive explosions not only send Bond’s enemies flying through the air, but also demolish key bits of the environment.
And after all, isn’t that what Bond is all about?
Source: http://www.ign.com
