Quantum of Solace Interview

Bond is back. Well, not quite, but later this month the slick super spy will be. And not only on the big screen, either. Quantum of Solace is getting the video game treatment too, from Call of Duty: World at War developer Treyarch, no less. At a recent preview event in London we got a chance to sip dry Martinis (we didn’t, we had a couple of Coca Colas) with Treyarch’s Adam Gascoine, the game’s co-design director, and chatted GoldenEye, annual Bond games and the lessons learned from Jason Bourne.

VideoGamer.com: It’s exciting times for Treyarch at the moment. You seem to have a hell of a lot going on.

Adam Gascoine: It is. We’re really busy over there. The thing is we read forums, just like everyone else does. We’ve received a little bit of flak over the years so we’re making a concerted effort to make sure that people know that the company is full of gamers. So we took on a lot this year. We’ve got three games coming out. We’ve got this (Quantum of Solace), Call of Duty 5 and we’ve got a Spider-Man game (Web of Shadows) coming out. And our team is involved in several other projects as well in Activision. We’ve taken a lot under our belt. But it’s in an effort to really put our name on the map and say we’re gamers at heart. We can make really good games. We have a format and we know how to produce a good game in two years.

VideoGamer.com: Will Quantum of Solace be the game to convince some of the doubters?

AG: Yeah I hope so. We’re a very different game from Call of Duty and I think we’re going to appeal to a different market and there’s obviously going to be cross over because everyone who buys any game ever made has played CoD4, so there’s always going to be cross over. I think the CoD5 team from Treyarch are going to get more of that question, they’re going to have to answer that question. Just as a team for Treyarch I hope and I do believe that people will look at this and say, ‘OK they’ve embraced what we loved about GoldenEye in particular, embraced what we love about Daniel Craig and they’ve really thought about this game as a stand alone game, not just a licensed game’. I mean a licensed game takes six to nine months to put together. We spent two-and-a-half years so we must have been doing something in that time. And we hope it really shows, and we believe it really does show in the game. There’s a lot of gameplay in there.

VideoGamer.com: Would it have been better for you if GoldenEye had never existed?

AG: I don’t know. I don’t know if it would. I think in hindsight some would say yes, I wish it had never existed. Actually it’s beneficial to us, to be honest with you, because it’s like a motivator. It might turn out bad, you never know, right? But it’s a motivator. You’ve always got this 500 pound gorilla in the room. We play it all of the time. We’ve got it up and running.

VideoGamer.com: Really?

AG: Oh yeah. It’s a great game. We love the game.

VideoGamer.com: It’s a bit old, isn’t it?

AG: Yeah, it doesn’t look too good right now but it still plays really well. Well the controls are a bit funky actually! We also know that’s what people are expecting. We had to try and recreate what happened eight or nine years ago. Now we can’t do that because nostalgia paints a much prettier picture than reality, you know what I mean? But we still played it, we played all of the games. We played Nightfire, Rogue Agent, we had all of the games up and running, GoldenEye being the one we really paid attention to. So we tried to take what it is about that game that people loved so much and we tried to make sure that we brought at least some of that across to our games so that people saw that we respected the history of the franchise.

VideoGamer.com: Is it the case that 11 years after the game came out it’s time for us to get over GoldenEye and move on?

AG: Maybe. I mean it might be. I guess in that respect yeah it probably would be nice to have nothing to compare to. But you could also say the advantage is that people will look at this game and say ‘oh my God! They got it! Another GoldenEye!’. And that’s just going to be wonderful for us if we get that. But I think the actual content of our game does put it to bed. It is different enough. It’s more about just getting those people who loved GoldenEye to move onto this new thing, to give some kind of connection between the two games. It’s not a very strong connection, it’s more about the intensity. The intensity and the feeling of power you got when you played GoldenEye, you really felt like you really were the biggest bad ass in the room, and you could just own everything in the room. That kind of thing we’ve really tried to put across.

VideoGamer.com: It sounds like it might be the Bond game that’s come closest to GoldenEye in terms of quality.

AG: Well we would be very proud if we got that. And actually it does still play pretty well, it really does, GoldenEye. If you can get over the crappy graphics! But I play a lot of flash games so I don’t have high standards! I don’t have time to immerse myself in Metal Gear Solid 4 unfortunately.

VideoGamer.com: How much did you learn from the Bourne game in terms of, we’re not going to do that, that’s rubbish?

AG: The thing we learned from the Bourne game was firstly how lucky we were to have Daniel Craig involved. It’s really hard to make a game where the people know the hero and not have the hero in the game. That’s hard work for those guys. They instantly have a struggle to get over that no matter how good their game is. The second thing we learned is some of the stuff they tackled, they took on their fighting and driving, before we even saw the Bourne game we’d already chosen to not do it the way they’re doing it, but actually seeing their game just helped us decide ‘you know well it’s really good that we didn’t do this’, not because it’s good or bad just because we don’t want people to say ‘oh it’s just another Bourne game’. We need to be different. Even though driving is something I think you would expect even more so in a Bond game, we made the choice to take it out for the quality of the game to make sure the rest of the game was up to par. But I think seeing it in the Bourne game just helped separate us a little bit from them. We aren’t Jason Bourne we’re James Bond. And he could kick Bond’s ass!

VideoGamer.com: What about the quick time events and the melee combat? In Bourne there were so many QTEs you were too busy looking at the pop up to see what was going on on-screen. How did you tackle that problem?

AG:We simplified it. We remembered that we’re a game, right, so what we want to make sure is that it’s fun to do. And also if it’s something that you’re going to repeat hundreds of times probably throughout the game it needs to be something that’s enjoyable hundreds of times. It’s not going to be the greatest thing you’ve ever done by the hundredth time but as long as it’s not frustrating and it’s enjoyable to get through that works for us. So what we did was we got the God of War combat designer to come over, his name’s Derek Daniels, he’s a great guy, really good designer, and we said ‘look, what is enjoyable, feels responsive, feels like you’re involved but you don’t have to sit there and press every single button?’. So we came up with a melee system that’s very straightforward and you don’t have to do it either. That’s the other thing. One of the things in the Bourne game is you’re forced into it. We elected not to do that. You can choose whether to do it or not. You can just keep using your gun all the way through but if you want to get into melee combat that is available to you. And when you do it’s very straightforward, it’s fairly simple button presses with consequences obviously if you fail but not drastic, it’s fairly casual. We want to keep it fairly simple.

VideoGamer.com: So it doesn’t feel QTE heavy then?

AG: I don’t know, you might think that. You know it’s cinematic. We had to make sure we pulled the camera out. We wanted to look at Daniel Craig a lot. I mean he looks good! He looks damn good in the game! We’re very proud of his model. So I guess there is the possibility that you’ll think that. I think there really is enough combat in our game and the guns feel so good, they feel so tactile and so responsive, with the Call of Duty 4 weapon system, that I don’t think it’s too much. I actually think we tried to strike a balance that it’s just enough that I need to do something else other than shoot my gun, suddenly bam! You’re into an event. We do the construction site chase from the Casino Royale movie. That is basically all third-person camera and all fairly simple presses. It’s not difficult to get through. It’s just a moment for you to sit back, relax, enjoy what you’re doing and then boom! You’re back into a huge fight. But is there too much or not? That’ll be for you to say when you play it, right?

VideoGamer.com: Reports suggest Activision intends to release Bond games annually. Is that something you guys are doing? Are you already thinking about the second game?

AG: Yeah we’re already thinking about it definitely. We’re big fans. I’m pretty sure we won’t be doing the 2009… I’m not sure what Activision has planned, if they’re doing one next year or… I would imagine so. They will probably do two teams in tandem.

VideoGamer.com: A similar thing to Call of Duty then?

AG: Probably, yeah. I know that we’re not doing it. I know that we are starting work on the next project, we don’t actually know what the project is, we’re doing team structure stuff right now. I do know that our team wants to work on the next Bond. Because we feel we have a lot more to say. The first game in a franchise is never the greatest game ever made. We’ve got a really good game and we’re really proud of it but we want to build. We want to go like Call of Duty 1 to Call of Duty 2, Halo 1 to Halo 2. We want to make sure that gamers can play this and say ‘all right this is the start of a dynasty’. This is going to get better and better and better. There’s stuff we really want to improve on. We also want to get driving in the game. We had it in the game for like a year, but we took it out because we didn’t want to do a license game where it’s just got everything and is an average level all the way through. So we took all of those resources and put them into combat. But if we do the game again, another version, we want to put some of that stuff back in.

VideoGamer.com: So you guys won’t be doing the next one. You’ll be doing the one after that?

AG: If there’s one coming up next year it’s not us. I honestly don’t know whether they’re doing one or not.

VideoGamer.com: But you will be doing another one?

AG: I believe so, yeah. It hasn’t been fully decided yet. I know that we’re carrying on as if we are. We’re assuming we are. Because we think the game’s good. So we think they’re going to look at it and go ‘oh right you get the next one as well’.

VideoGamer.com: You need more movies then.

AG: Well I think there’s probably one. They do one every two years anyway right? I know we’ll get the script as soon as everyone else.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned that you looked at GoldenEye quite closely. Will there be anything that GoldenEye fans will find familiar, maybe some maps inspired by classic GoldenEye maps or Easter Eggs?

AG: Yeah, there are. But the funny thing is it starts out as that and then over months and months of development, the final product, I don’t know, we know the connection, you might look at it and go, ‘that’s nothing like it, I don’t get that connection at all’. But there is some stuff in there. But it’s more about the emotional attachment people had to GoldenEye. We just don’t want to let them down. So we want to make sure that that feeling of intensity, the emotional ride that game took you through, the surprise of ‘oh my God there’s a guy in front of me! Bang bang bang!’, you know that kind of intensity and that rush. We tried to make sure that that was the thing that we focused on. But there are actually some specific gameplay things as well which pay homage to GoldenEye.

VideoGamer.com: Any examples?

AG: Control scheme. Some of the control stuff… we messed around a little bit. There’s also some naming conventions in there. There’s a data collection system in the game and some of that refers to some of the GoldenEye moments. There’s also a level – Train. I think we have a really great train level. There’s a lot of games that have done train levels. Gears of War did a train level. Splinter Cell did a kick ass train level. We really liked ours. But ours, basically, we didn’t have Train in the game. We knew it was in the original script and got cut. Someone actually played GoldenEye and went ‘why aren’t we doing the train?’ It’s GoldenEye and it’s right here. So we did. You may not recognise the two, I don’t know, but it was in our hearts.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time, Adam.

Quantum of Solace is due out for Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, DS and PS2 on October 31.