Quantum of Solace First Look Preview

Just look at those eyes. You can see them peering out into what looks like nothing as Treyarch’s Bond, viewed from a third-person perspective whenever he snaps to cover, calmly, collectively waits to pounce. You see, there’s about a million bad guys around the corner, just gagging to put a bullet in 007’s head. And it’s your job to stop that from happening.

Before we get to all that though, some positive factoids. QoS is being built with Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare engine, and Treyarch is working very closely with their fellow developers to make sure they get the best out of it. Another positive is that Treyarch has over 100 people working on the game right now, according to executive producer Garrett Young, who’s demoing the Xbox 360 version of the game for us. And if that wasn’t enough for you positive factoid junkies, here’s another one. The game kicks off with QoS and tells the story of Casino Royale through flashbacks, so there should be plenty of game in there for spy fans to sink their teeth into (the sub six-hour long single-player The Bourne Conspiracy campaign is still fresh in our memory banks).

Now for a not so positive factoid. Quick time events will play an important role in the game. Quick melee kills, electronic lock picking mini games, the lot. The problem is that we’re getting pretty tired of QTEs (The Bourne Conspiracy suffered from QTE overload). We know why developers use them – it’s an accessible and easy game mechanic and it allows them to present much more cinematic action events. But we always end up feeling cheated by them – wishing we could have done the really cool thing we’ve just seen happen rather than, well, just watch it. And, when they’re applied to mini games, we tend to think they’re needlessly annoying and frustrate through overuse (Mass Effect springs to mind).

Treyarch is officially describing QoS as a ‘first-person action’ game, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. While the primary perspective is first-person, there are plenty of moments when you’ll get to see the iconic spy in all his suited and booted glory, mainly when Bond is crawling along wall ledges, snapping to cover and kicking lumps out of bad guys in melee combat. Those of you longing for a pure Bond FPS ala GoldenEye only have yourselves to blame. Garrett tells us that although most gamers said they wanted an FPS Bond game when it went out and asked them, around a third wanted to see Bond as well. In the end, based on that consumer research, the developer decided to do both.

Garrett compared QoS with Ubisoft Montreal’s popular FPS/Third-person hybrid shooter Rainbow Six Vegas, but with a less punishing learning curve. We get a sense of what he’s talking about from a live demo of a level in the game that mirrors the aftermath of the famous Bond versus Le Chiffre gambling scene in Casino Royale. Fans of the film will remember well when Bond goes up to his hotel room and all hell breaks loose. The level we’re seeing is Treyarch’s expanded take on that.

The first thing we noticed was that Treyarch’s given Bond a lot, and by a lot we actually mean a ton, of bad guys to sort out. Such is the endless stream of goons that pour out into Casino Royale’s many rooms and hallways that warlord Steven Obanno, whose money Le Chiffre has lost, must have some kind of henchmen cloning factory built into the back of the hotel. Obanno’s completely taken over and, as you’d expect, chaos ensues.

The second thing we noticed was how often the visual ‘dash to cover with A’ sign post pops up at the bottom of the screen. We know it’s needed, hell, even Gears of War, in our opinion the best cover-based console game yet, has them. But it pops up so frequently in the QoS build we’re seeing that it’s just annoying. And we’re simply watching. While Garrett reassures us that the team is working on sorting this out, we’re praying that it doesn’t end up becoming more annoying than useful in the final build.

When Bond is in cover the perspective, as we’ve mentioned, shifts to third-person, and you can see 007’s piercing blue eyes and expressionless face as well as his classic black suit while you wait for goons to pass by or bad guys to pop out of cover. There is a degree of destructible environments – some things you can’t shoot through and some things you can. A bad guy hides behind a luggage cart. Shoot through it! we mentally scream at the HD TV. Oh, must be amazingly expensive luggage. And made out of Adamantium.

That might be silly, but there’s environmental effects that do catch the eye and impress. Chandeliers sway as chaos ensues below, and can be shot down if goons are stupid enough to stand underneath them. Lamps, ornaments, glasses and pretty much anything sat on a table explode in a shower of shattered bits. Bond crawls to an outside balcony, the camera panning to reveal an impressive moonlit vista of the hotel grounds. With his trusty Walther P99 (one of 20 available in the game), we see Bond slay bad guy after bad guy as he moves about the hotel. But this cavalier approach isn’t the only way to tackle Bond’s enemies, Garret tells us. And to demonstrate, he restarts the level and shows us how a player who enjoys the shadows would take on the game’s challenge. Without the shouting on guards and the explosion of gun barrels, we hear a wistful piano tune as Bond creeps about Casino Royale’s nooks and crannies. 007 spends much of his time crouching, using cover to hide as goons patrol and pass by. We see a context sensitive quick melee kill as Bond creeps up behind an unsuspecting henchman and chucks him over a balcony. Daniel Craig’s Bond is a much more physical secret agent than his predecessors, and that brutality is being reflected in the game. Bond has 30 different moves to play around with, and, like in The Bourne Conspiracy, if you don’t time your QTE right the AI will get up and shoot you. In the face. As 007 makes his way across window ledges, crouching underneath room windows, the screen splits horizontally in two. At the top of the screen is an image of inside the room, so the player can see enemy patrols, at the bottom is the third-person Bond.

There’s only so much sneaking a secret agent can do though, and it’s not long before it all kicks off again. Bond finds a machine gun and lets rip, zooming in CoD4-style to dispatch bad guys with ease. He’s also got some tricks up his sleeve, as you’d expect. 007 can move objects, like carts, with X and even climb up into ventilation shafts and crawl towards other rooms. This is how Bond finds the room where Obanno’s men have taken Le Chiffre. Bond jumps down and starts shooting. Grenades flash and ears ring. In the hotel spa gun fire realistically blows chunks out of ornate statues as Bond takes cover, mixing blind fire with peeking out and taking more accurate shots. Think the lobby scene from The Matrix except with a pool. The guards keep coming, and Bond keeps shooting. And then, when we think it’s all over, even more guards appear. It’s like a war has descended on Casino Royale.

Graphics wise, the game looks tidy with Bond himself a clear focus of effort. His face, while emotionless during third-person view at this stage, is incredibly detailed. Treyarch has clearly done a great job of making those piercing blue eyes stand out. And the developer is still working on the main man’s mug, polishing an “intense looks without scrunching up his face” as well as implementing facial reactions to on-screen action. Garrett tells us the team has scanned all of the films’ major actors, so character models should turn out well too. During a studio visit the team found Daniel Craig playing Guitar Hero in his trailer, a sight that the Activision suits will certainly have found pleasing. According to Garrett, Craig is a “huge gamer” and even asked Treyarch to leave the dev kit running the advanced build of the game with him so he could keep playing, something that won’t have pleased the Activision suits.

When you think about it, there’s a lot of pressure on Treyarch for this game. Sure, there’s pressure on them to deliver with Call of Duty: World at War, but this is a different pressure. With World at War, the pressure is on to compete with Infinity Ward’s ever popular FPS classic Modern Warfare. With Quantum of Solace, Treyarch has to deal with the spectre of the N64’s GoldenEye hanging over it, as it has hung over every James Bond game made ever since, and, on top of that, this is the first ‘next-gen’ Bond game. Now that we think about it even harder, we reckon there might be even more pressure on Treyarch to deliver with QoS than there is for them to deliver with WaW.

Will they deliver? It’s too early to tell. There’s still much we don’t know about QoS right now. Treyarch hasn’t started talking about the multiplayer portion of the game yet, so that’s an important unknown. We haven’t seen much of Bond’s gadgets either, although we’re told they will be more “MI6 in five years” and in keeping with the recent film’s more realistic direction – mobiles to hack locks and security cameras, iPhone-style ‘Smart Walls’, which will make an appearance in the new movie, to download info on a level and enemy movement in real time, that sort of thing. And there’s clearly a lot of tweaking left to be done. Treyarch is still tuning Bond’s health system, unsure at this stage whether to go with a Halo-style regeneration mechanic or something else, and, thankfully, the number of bad guys that pour out of the henchman cloning factory that follows Bond about. The dash to cover mechanic may well end up slightly different too, with Bond running away from the camera as he snaps to cover and then you quickly catch up. There are bits we know are in the game that we haven’t seen. The defibrillator scene will be in there, supposedly as some kind of mini-game. There will be chase sequences, used to change pace, as well. Remember Casino Royale’s heart-thumping Parkour chase opening? That will be in there, and the first-person controls will be the same, but there will be more of an emphasis on navigation and timing. Mirror’s Edge in disguise? Could be. The point here though is that Treyarch has the time to polish, given that they’re working from an engine rather than the ground up.

There’s nothing we’ve seen to suggest the game will suffer from the deserved critical mauling numerous post GoldenEye Bond games have endured, but there’s nothing to suggest QoS will reach the heights Rare soared at either (the QTE elements don’t exactly thrill us). With the film due out this November, the coming months will paint a much more detailed picture on how Bond’s first ‘next-gen’ outing will turn out.

Quantum of Solace is due out for Xbox 360 and PS3 this autumn.