Garrett Young is the Executive Producer of the Bond team at Activision's Treyarch studio.  Before joining Activision, Garrett spent 12 years at Microsoft producing Forza Motorsport, Project Gotham Racing, and various sports titles. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

When launching a brand new franchise, the technology underlying your game is critical.  As a studio, we had to make a “build or buy” decision for our engine, and we looked around at a few different options.  When Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4 engine became an option for us, we knew it would be the best fit to bring James Bond to life on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Though this may sound backwards to how some people believe movie games are made, our vision as a team was to create strong core gameplay first, then immerse that gameplay in the world of Bond.  It’s true that most gamers will play our game because they want to “Be Bond,” but if the game isn’t great, that suspension of disbelief will be lost.

The Call of Duty 4 engine really helped us toward that goal.  I’ve been on a team in the past where we made the wrong call on an engine, only to end up spending two-thirds of our development cycle trying to get content through the pipeline and into the build.  Though the game ended up being great, it took us six months longer than we expected.

With the COD4 engine, we had levels up and running immediately.  This quick turnaround time helped our designers learn the tools and let us focus our time on gameplay iteration and balance.  We built a brand new team for Quantum of Solace; if we had been stuck designing on paper while our Engineers spent months building the engine – or figuring out how it worked – our timelines would have doubled.

Our lead character is a hard man.  As seen in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s new James Bond is more physical, more cunning, and more dangerous than any Bond before.  In our initial design work, this led us to a game targeted at a hardcore gamer.  When we stepped back to evaluate our plans, we didn’t feel that was the right decision.  Although Daniel Craig is brand new, James Bond has a long rich history, and not all Bond fans spend 10+ hours/week playing games like we do.  After re-thinking our strategy, we created a Bond we felt would be more accessible to a mainstream audience.

Some previews have said the first-person elements of our game feel like a Call of Duty game, which makes sense.  Though we added the new layer of third-person Cover Combat, we looked at the best first-person shooters when setting game variables like player movement speed, reticle speed, depth-of-field, ADS zoom (“align down sight”), weapon damage, reload speeds, grenade distance, etc.  We also researched level layouts – opening reads, enemy engagement distances, elevation change, visibility, and cover locations were all things we investigated in games like Call of Duty, Halo, Rainbow Six Vegas, Half-Life, Bioshock, and others.

Another game often mentioned in our Previews is GoldenEye. Rare’s GoldenEye was not only the best ever James Bond game, but it was also the first epic first-person shooter on console.  We are all huge fans of GoldenEye – one of our guys actually became a game developer because he loved the game so much! – and we are humbled by any comparisons made to that game, but they’re not fair.  GoldenEye defined a new genre.  We’re very proud of our game, but comparing the two games is like comparing the pilot of a cross-country flight to Lewis and Clark; we may cover the same distance – faster, and more comfortably – but the landscape is much different now than it was back then.  Rare was a true trailblazer with GoldenEye, and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude for the high quality bar they set with their game.

There are a hell of a lot of great games out there right now – I wish I had time to play them all!  But with our technology, a strong lead character, and the fond memories gamers have for GoldenEye, we think Quantum of Solace will fill a need mainstream gamers won’t get in other games this Holiday.  We hope people enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it.