The two best vehicular sequences in the game don’t feature cars at all, though. Or at least not ones you’re driving, since you do get to smash up plenty of others. At one point in the game, Bond escapes a gala by commandeering a garbage truck and wreaking havoc through the streets of London, and then later on he takes control of a giant mining truck and drives it through a quarry in Vietnam to, again, save his friends and escape the bad guys. While both sequences are small parts of much longer missions, they’re absolute blasts to play through, some of my favorite moments of the game for sure, and they feel totally Bond. Just as you might realize, “oh hell yeah, I think Bond is gonna get in that tank” while watching one of the films, I was sitting on my couch thinking, “oh hell yeah, am I about to drive that thing?”
IO Interactive
Vega said the two sequences came about in very different ways, with the mine truck being more organic. “The level’s getting put together, and somebody puts a prop in, and then I think there is that incentive in game development, and especially in Bond, where you just want to say ‘yes’ to the player. Like you’re rolling downhill, and someone throws something into the snowball, and instead of rejecting it you keep going.” You see a bunch of these mining trucks earlier on in the mission, the game teasing what’s about to come without you even knowing it yet. “The mining truck there being part of establishing the space, the place, and then ever so slightly you go, ‘guys, well, let’s go,’ because you embody the mind of the character,” Poulsen said of the scene being thought up on the fly.
“[That’s the thing of First Light] being a catered experience. It’s not open world, it’s not everything, it’s not all the vehicles; it’s a specific subset of vehicles. That means it’s interesting for us, that we can lure you forward with this truck and all these things, and have you go ‘ah, yeah,’ you got what you wanted. Rather than have a plethora of vehicles in front of you and you go ‘OK, cool, which one?’ No, the one we chose,” said Poulsen. “You get what you wanted, but in a way that you wholly couldn’t imagine or didn’t imagine — unless you’re a Bond fan, of course, in which case maybe you do imagine it.”
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The garbage truck, meanwhile, was a much longer road to get to. Vega talked about how resourcefulness is one of Bond’s key character traits, one that differentiates him from other secret agent characters, and that’s baked into the level designs from jump. Another one of Bond’s best qualities is how he’ll smash straight through an obstacle and keep on going. Which he does in this sequence quite a lot. “It was always in the script that he’s going to get into this bin lorry in this really unexpected fashion. I think Craig embodied that, I think Brosnan had a bit of that, I think Dalton had a bit of that — put two dots on a map and draw a straight line, that’s how James Bond got there, and that is a really cool moment of expression,” Vega said.
IO Interactive
What makes the garbage truck escape especially cathartic is how the mission starts: with an upset Bond sitting in traffic in a Range Rover SV, having a conversation with his boss. You can’t even side-swipe traffic, with the game displaying a parking sensor warning on the screen and pulling the car back into the lane. “It’s such a Londoner inside commentary there. He’s frustrated, he’s been told to stand down. We stick you in a powerful fantasy vehicle like the Land Rover and you can’t open it up, you’re just running errands. It’s putting you in that headspace,” said Vega, “so when we finally put you behind the wheel [of the garbage truck] an hour and a half later it’s just like go go go go through the wall!”
