It’s funny, I see all this talk of the new 007 looking like Tom Cruise around the internet. Am I alone in not thinking that at all? I swear people are faceblind
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I’d love a retro-futuristic aesthetic from 007 Legends, where Goldfinger’s level looked like something out of Thunderbirds. They blended it well, with touchscreen devices but neo-1960s architecture and classic cars.
Very well put 
in fact, it was so well written I thought you’d pasted an article by a video games journalist 
I really enjoyed the driving mechanics in Blood Stone, where the vehicles felt like they had the correct weighting to them (unlike the Bourne video game where it was like driving a pinball on ice 
).
And a rogue 00 agent who will call him by first name and act as a mirror to Bond’s own persona a la Alec Traevawaleyne. He could give a speech like Rak did in Blood Stone “Why die for a country who will deny you ever existed? Who won’t even bring flowers to your unmarked gravestone?”
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Or she.
The trailer doesn’t give a gender to 009.
It’s a few sentences, so its coyness could be accidental and non-indicative.
(Then again again some foreign subtitles version of the trailer have masculine pronoun. But are they indicative? Like the German one completely erases the chess double talk.)
I don’t know. It gave me that impression on first watch.
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You could be right, I doubt it’ll be 009 in the clown suit from Octopussy.
German’s masculine, Spanish too, and French is feminine but retains the chess metaphor (albeit literally). Someone posted a Russian dubbed trailer to Facebook which I now can’t find, but it was masculine in that too. It could be unrelated, but it would be a refreshing change for the main villain to be a she. We’ve had Elektra King, May Day and Miss Frost (Miranda?), but often they’ve been side villains or Bond girls turned side villains (or vice versa).
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I don’t know if anyone else brought it up or if I am the first one to bring it up and question it.
I am also too lazy to check so don’t go hard on me if anyone else did!
In the trailer the lady we still don’t know the name of (or only I don’t know, I never watched the movies) said that “Bond is a bullet without a target, let’s give him one.”
THAT is a badass line and an oddly familier one.
Diana told Tamara Vidal in Mendoza that “47 is a weapon and weapons don’t judge, they go where they’re pointed.”
Now, it got me to wonder, since 47 and 007 get compared quite alot, did IO compared them a little more by comparing 47 to a weapon and 007 to a bullet?
Ofcourse this theory is heavily relying on IOI being the writers of First Light and not Amazon MGM, tho I do hope that IOI are not the writers of this one, they’re writing skills are… limited.
Diana had so many fake betrayals in WOA to the point that I can’t even remember how many times she switched sides, lol.
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Well, if they were fake betrayals, she never really switched sides at all. But, I get your point regardless.
Can I use the “Not a native english speaker, sometimes it’s harder to be perfectly clear” excuse?
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No you cannot! 
The lady is M, Bond’s boss at the beginning of the WoA, it’s implied that 47 is weapon without a purpose. That his early killings were “disordered, random” and that the ICA could give him purpose (the same thing he sought from the church in Hitman 2:SA). It looks like they’re going down the same route, that Bond is a useful tool currently wasted. M sees potential in him.
A divergence I do see is that this M seems to not only tolerate his outlandish behavior but actually encourages it. Seems he was headhunted to be unpredictable and rebellious.
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Huh, great to know.
Glad that it does not rip my entire theory apart.
Having both 47 and 007 being compared to a weapon and a bullet is a nice touch by IOI, sorta comparing them both yet showcasing their differences.
Tho I still hope for a better story than the hitman game’s stories lol.
But yeah, overall, still a nice connection between 47 and 007.
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Which, I must say, I never really liked when this view of Bond was introduced, primarily in the Craig films. Yes, Bond does have to kill his primary enemies under orders from his government, to save the world, and at times in self-defense, but it’s never really been the real purpose of the character’s work. His skills as a spy, infiltrator, and saboteur are what he’s really dispatched for, with the option/necessity of killing the main bad guy being a secondary objective or being made his mission after he’s uncovered the bulk of their evil plot. He’s not really a Professional Killer by trade, it just comes with the job a lot of the time.
47, on the other hand, is the inverse; killing the target is the job. 47 is assigned to just straight up terminate the bad guy from the get-go, and by extension, his secondary objectives are spying, sabotage, thievery, hostage rescue, and at times directly saving the world. He can do all of those things, and they may be just as important to the client as terminating the target, but they don’t send in 47 unless the death of the target solves the majority of the problem, and getting to said target is the main difficulty.
Say Bond and 47 occupied the same universe (maybe they will with this game’s continuity, who knows), and they are both sent in on a mission together, Bond from MI6 directly, 47 being contracted through ICA/freelance Diana by MI6 as an additional asset, and the goal is to kill a major cyberterrorist, destroy a satellite weapon system, steal all of the villain’s data on their weapon, and rescue the kidnapped scientists who were forced to help build it. You’re gonna send 47 in to kill the target and swipe the data, you’re gonna send Bond in to destroy the satellite and rescue the hostages, and while both are capable of doing each other’s jobs, if you really want to make sure it gets done as quickly and efficiently as possible, you divide up the labor in that way at the very least.
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I agree though I’ll say that your view of Bond describes the classic Bond and not the modern one.
Classic Cold War era Bond was one of patriotism - Bond as a spy, infiltrator, saboteur. Like a soldier (or navy man in his case), they’re trained to kill but it’s not their sole purpose. Unlike an assassin.
But the fall of the Soviet Union brought in post-modern Bond with Brosnan and Craig, where the enemy is far less clear. As M said, the world is now more opaque. There’s no flag or face we now fear. The enemy is within, and often it’s within the politics and economics of the country. The line between friend and foe isn’t so obvious anymore. And in that continuity, Bond is explicitly referred to as an assassin (Brosnan in Die Another Day and Craig in Spectre), because the 00 Program went from covert one-man armies that could achieve all manner of tasks, to a black ops squad like in the Bourne movies. Bond’s been re-invented as a black operative now, probably because in the modern day that’s what a trained killer would be classified as. Hopefully this game will blend assassin and spy together. A weapon that can do damage not just from being fired, but from being a deterrent too.
Amusing side note, I remember every time a Bond movie would come out, memos would go around the departments reminding people that humint isn’t really like that and is in fact very boring. This is because of an influx of case officer applications from people thinking they’ll be getting into car chases and playing baccarat and saving the world from nuclear war You’ll be in equally dangerous situations, but you won’t have a bulletproof sports car or an SMG with you, you’ll have a rental and a flashlight
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Part of the problem with that, though, is that we now have so many characters like that (Jason Bourne, John Wick, The Equalizer, the guy from Taken, any character Jason Statham ever plays), that having Bond be explicitly an espionage operative who only resorts to killing as the need arises, rather than classifying him as an assassin from the outset, makes the character more interesting, less similar to his contemporaries in modern times.
I do hope that all the killing and shooting we see in the trailer is not the bulk of the game, and that the kind of stealth we’ve grown accustomed to in Hitman is where the real thrill lies, and that all the action is either scripted events, or only happens if you should screw up and blow your cover as Bond. This is literally IOI’s bread and butter, so hopefully they applied it to the 007 franchise.
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What has initially cool has unfortunately become the norm. The formula is the same: 30-50 year old white male, American or British, athletically build and knows martial arts. Expert in every weapon known to man (even obscure ones), first aid, interrogation and resistance to it. Pilot, sailor, defensive driver, and can operate industrial machinery. They’re always mysterious, deadly and known by the villains by name (Oh my God that’s Jason Bourne) and usually get them saying “Goddamnit, he’s just one man!”. Traumatic past guarded by a stoic demeanor, a tragic romantic life and usually orphanhood. They speak any language needed with complete fluency and can take out a whole room of goons in one go without taking a major injury.
I myself am guilty of this, with a depressed mid-50s assassin of world class skill. The difference is he’s 100% an assassin, in training, in skills, in psychology and in use. Bond is a whole rainbow of skills, but the writers do seem to focus on that one color.
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The Equalizer is a distinguished exception to this, but the trope holds otherwise.
You forgot to mention improbable aiming skills, improbable survival skills, able to walk away from an explosion less than twenty feet away without flinching, doesn’t feel any injuries to the arms or legs after the first few seconds, and never have any damage to the face aside from a possible shallow cut just above one of the eyebrows. Oh, and the female leads usually end up coming at them, crotch first, without their even having to make a move… somehow.
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Cool guys don’t look at explosions! I expect the Bond girls to be a bit more hard to get in this one, lest they become two-dimensional eye candy. A fleshed out female lead is a change from the originals I do welcome!
Improbable aiming skills, I am guilty as charged 
But I do elaborate that it’s their ‘thing’ and they’ve trained themselves over a long period, not some magic thing they can do ‘because they’re ex-special forces’. And there needs to be limits to it
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Yeah, 47 at least has an excuse. None of the others do; no amount of training can let you shoot with accuracy while falling down a building or dual wielding.
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Oh yeah no way, and for that reason I hope Bond’s apparent ‘instinct’ ability doesn’t involve some point shooting. Mine’s a quick draw, whip the gun out and shoot someone before they can react, but even that’s limited to 2 people max because any more than that and the 3rd’s shot you by the time you reach them.
I wonder if quicktime events will be used for the hand-to-hand stuff? Blood Stone had a one-click system which I kinda wish they’d used in WoA because 47’s the apex predator who makes international assassinations look easy. He should be able to take down a guard in one movement with a tap of a button, even if it’s not as challenging as a quicktime brawl. Classic Bond used to brawl more, so it would make sense to retain it, especially if they’re using the same game engine.
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By the way.
I don’t know if it’s just a cinematic, or even if the location will be playable/navigable between floors if so. (I could see it be like the safehouse in Freelancer)
But elevator at 1:12.
(and then we find out it is working, but only in this location, and only because NPC don’t move out of their posts)
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