While it’s not a series of truly Hitman-scale murder sandboxes, 007 First Light does make good on its promise of enabling multiple Bond, James Bonding disciplines: shooting, sneaking, punching, and my personal favourite, getting immediately discovered then bullshitting something about being a door technician for supervillain lairs. But, were it not for some rejigging work on IO Interactive’s part, First Light might well have ended up with an undue preference for the brawling, bloody, Daniel-Craig-in-a-bathroom approach.
That’s according to senior combat designer Tom Marcham, whom I briefly interrogated at a taping of the UKIE’s For One Night Only showcase. Marcham says that although there “was always the idea that [First Light] was going to be this kind of flexible blend” of secret agent styles, in the crucible of active development, the strength of straight up henchman-punching repeatedly threatened to wallop the stealth and social aspects into irrelevance.
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Category: Gaming
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"It started to feel like there wasn't any stealth": 007 First Light had to pull Bond's punches to protect IO Interactive's specialty sneaking
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Here's your next batch of Xbox Game Pass games for July
Xbox has revealed the next batch of games coming to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service during the remainder of July and in early August, with Halo: Campaign Evolved and Hell Is Us spearheading the selection. Read more
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Tesla Robotaxis go to Florida
It must be earnings day, because Tesla is making a Robotaxi announcement. The company said in a post on X that it was launching its Robotaxi service in Orlando and Tampa, attaching a pair of maps that show each city's service area. No word on fleet size or whether interested customers would be able to […]
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Instagram will let users endlessly swap the audio on old posts
There's a symbiotic – and sometimes frustrating – relationship between social media sites and the creators that depend on them. Platforms need influencers' and creators' content to keep consumers on their apps; the creators, in turn, need to be able to reach those audiences to justify creating their content in the first place. Creators want […]
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Manor Lords' next beta update adds what all video games are sorely missing: cow breeding
Anyone who knows me knows that the one frustration I come back to in games, above all else, more than yellow paint, quest markers and horrendously written dialogue, is that there just isn't enough cow breeding. Where is it? The video game industry is sorely lacking in that department, but fear not fellow freaks, Manor Lords has our back, as by the end of the month you'll be able to breed your cattle to your hearts' content.
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Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book piracy settlement approved by judge
A federal judge has signed off on Anthropic's $1.5 billion class action settlement with authors who accused the company of training its AI models on copyrighted books, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an order on Monday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín writes that the settlement will provide "meaningful relief," offering authors around $3,000 for each book […]