craveonline

Crave Online: What thought did you give to the old Goldeneye game, which sort of remains the high watermark for Bond games?

Jeremy Luyties: This is a really good question. We're very fortunate that with this franchise, a lot of people have made a lot of Bond games. So we've gotten to see a lot of different ideas executed on. Obviously there was one particular game that people remember more than most and it's probably safe to say that it's had a very heavy influence on us, just because of what it did for the fan base, what it brought to multiplayer. It was definitely a heavy influence on our game and you can see that influence just from the perspective of it's first person. So if you notice, many Bond games of the last few years have all been third person. We thought it was really important to get back to this first person grass roots as well as include a touch of third person. So it definitely had a very heavy influence and we're very thankful that a game like that existed for us to look at, play and learn from.

Crave Online: They've tried original stories or basing games off of the movies. What are the pros and cons of each method?

Jeremy Luyties: Well, we didn't necessarily look and think negatively towards anybody.

Crave Online: Of course.

Jeremy Luyties: It was more of just like seeing what people tried. What it did was it gave us the confidence in making certain decisions so we would see certain techniques or story elements or game design techniques. We'd go, "Okay, that was cool, that was a good try but mm, that may not be what we want to do now." So it just gave us a lot of exposure to things without having to actually try them. We got to see a lot of different things being tried.

Crave Online: And you don’t include poker playing in the game?

Jeremy Luyties: When we looked at what would be the most unique and cool experiences to play for, there was a question about driving. Are there going to be things like driving in the game and the answer is no. But there are going to be different experiences in the game. For experience, the chase sequence from the construction site. That gives us our variety, but getting to the question, is there going to be a poker game? Well, there's two things that happen in that Casino Royale sequence. We tried to decide what would be best to do: play a poker minigame of which there are bazillions of poker games being played every night that people play for money? Or maybe we take a crack at creating a sequence where Bond drinks that martini glass and gets a little sick. Then what does Bond do? What would be a more enjoyable game play experience? We thought that it would be stronger to have the player deal with the drink and getting poisoned than necessarily doing the poker game. That's what we wanted to put our money in.

Crave Online: The torture scene is integral to the plot. Do you address it at least in a cut scene?

Jeremy Luyties: It is taken care of in the story but it's not a part of gameplay. That's another one of those instances where what would be the most fun to play? That's cool and it's novelty but there's another sequence we're doing and I can't get too much into it but it's pretty cool.

Crave Online: Well, being tied to a chair isn't really a playable level.

Jeremy Luyties: Yeah, it's actually a 45 minute level where you have to press the button for stamina. No, whenever you have quirky stuff like that, there's always little jokes about, "Hey, could we do that?" And it's like no.

Crave Online: That's what you talk about at 1 in the morning on your fifth Red Bull.

Jeremy Luyties: Exactly. No, there's no minigame for that but little moments that are throughout the whole game, just like the construction site and even with him getting sick. So if we can extrapolate something from that, imagine all the different things in the story that we can do to get that variety into the game so that you're not dealing with the same thing.

Crave Online: Can we expect any easter eggs from other Bond movies?

Jeremy Luyties: I don't know if I'm allowed to.