Did Goldeneye kill James Bond?

ok lets get this out of the way. Goldeneye was a great game.for its time it was an amzing game...but that was what? close to fifteen years ago?James Bond seems like a francise that is ripe for a good video game.hell,just mix in some uncharted and a bit of mass effect and BOOM! that would be a really good Bond game.but it seems to me that allmost every Bond game since goldeneye has been trying to recapture what made that game so great. hell,look at 007 LEGENDS. in many ways it's superior to Goldeneye in everyway. but the world has moved on since then. what was new and exciting in goldeneye is old hat in 2012.i think the reason the Bond series has sufferd so much is because they are allways trying to re create what made Goldeneye great,which is impossible. that and i think they try to go with whatever seems to be hot at the time. right now its call of duty and that just doesnt work for Bond.

So, what are your folks idea's for what makes Bond so hard to make good games for? i honestly hope what happens to Bond happens to what happend to Batman. he was in a series of shitty games and they just didnt care anymore.so they let a Dev just go nuts and make a great game.

@DoctorDanger99: I think it was less that it was ever a bond game and more than it was just a great shooter for a console and nobody had ever seen that before. I think it being attached to the James Bond Licence was just incidental.

Blood Stone was alright.

Alpha Protocol kinda scratched that itch for me personally, packing in some nice absurdity and comic relief as well. But yes, I see where you're coming from.

hell,look at 007 LEGENDS. in many ways it's superior to Goldeneye in everyway.

@Demoskinos: it was without a doubt a Bond game.thats like saying that Arkham City would have been a great game without batman in it. if you were to strip away all of the "bondness" of Goldeneye you would still have a solid game,but it would still be lacking and i doubt people would still be talking about it today.ive allways thought Turok was as good a game as goldeneye was yet it lacked the Bond universe.

@PillClinton: that game probly holds the record for being the most disapointing game ive ever played. ive never seen such a magnificent idea for a game totally and utterly wasted. dont get me wrong,the game is allright. but it's almost broken to the point of being unplayable.

I have always reviled GoldenEye and loved 007 Nightfire. I think GoldenEye is holding the franchise back the same way Ocarina of Time still being considered the "best Zelda game" is holding back Zelda.

@DoctorDanger99 said:

@PillClinton: that game probly holds the record for being the most disapointing game ive ever played. ive never seen such a magnificent idea for a game totally and utterly wasted. dont get me wrong,the game is allright. but it's almost broken to the point of being unplayable.

Hmm, ya know I think it really depends on how you play it, at least from what I remember hearing from the crew on the Bombcast. Dunno how you approached it, but I played pure stealth and pistols and it was a pretty fun, breezy experience. Apparently, run & gun completely ruins that game, or so I've heard. And it would seem that way, as there were a few excruciating combat sequences for me.

I agree with Jeff that Everything or Nothing (or whichever one it was) was a great game on the PS2, and that having every James Bond game be a first-person shooter is really silly.
 
BUT I think even if we erased GoldenEye from history, James Bond games would still be this. I don't think "we have to make it more like GoldenEye 64" is what's holding back developers on making a giant, unique, dynamic spy adventure. The reason there was a 007 car-combat game for the PS1 is why there's a 007 cinematic FPS now, cos at the highest decision-making level they just wanna put something out there that people're gonna buy. There's not enough passion out there for the world of James Bond for any developer to take the bull by the horns and make an Arkham Asylum out of it. 
 
Oh and in the game's defense it did have SOME spy things in it... not much, but some.

Everything or Nothing was fantastic. Went in a completely different direction than all the Bond games before it and it rocked. Goldeneye Reloaded was real good too, and I also liked Nightfire and TWINE (N64) but yeah, those were more or less still following in the footsteps of the original Goldeneye. I hope that they take another shot at a EoN style game. Bloodstone was in third person but I haven't played it and it looked like more of a shooter than the varied experience of EoN.

@PillClinton: i also tried the stealth approach. i made it close to the end before i gave up. ill go back again one day and finish but i just couldnt make myself do it. there was so much promise and greatness in that game and it all got pissed away. i love Obsidian but i think they should just be the ones coming up with the ideas,not actually making the games.of all the games they have ever made the only one i would consider and "true" game would be New Vegas and i bloody love that game.for whatever reason Obsidian allways makes very smart and interesting games that fall apart at a technical level.

im allways get excited whenever i hear about a game and then i see they are developing it and it stings. that south park game looks fucking brillant but i dont think ill buy it.

@TheFreeMan: dammit, i ALLWAYS forget EON. that actually was a really good game. it didnt do anything special but it nailed what a bond game should be. good point old man!

@Little_Socrates: Nightfire was ass. It was ass then, and it is most definitely ass now. It's probably aged better than Goldeneye has, but it was a lazy attempt to try to milk the franchise and the good will that Goldeneye created.

I specifically remember Nightfire being the game that kids who's parents wouldn't let them play M rated games were all over. Everyone else was actually playing good console shooters, like Halo or Timesplitters.

Now Everything or Nothing, THAT was a good post-Goldeneye Bond game. It actually tried to do something new, had a good feel and tone, and was pretty polished all around. I wish they would have iterated on that further than going back to the nostalgia well over and over.

@TheFreeMan: EVERYTHING OR NOTHING OR NOTHING. FOREVER!

But Nightfire was still fucking awful.

@GloomyTangent said:

@Little_Socrates: Nightfire was ass. It was ass then, and it is most definitely ass now. It's probably aged better than Goldeneye has, but it was a lazy attempt to try to milk the franchise and the good will that Goldeneye created.

I specifically remember Nightfire being the game that kids who's parents wouldn't let them play M rated games were all over. Everyone else was actually playing good console shooters, like Halo or Timesplitters.

Now Everything or Nothing, THAT was a good post-Goldeneye Bond game. It actually tried to do something new, had a good feel and tone, and was pretty polished all around. I wish they would have iterated on that further than going back to the nostalgia well over and over.

Yeah, I didn't have an Xbox, so that counts out Halo, which is obviously a better game. I could've played Timesplitters (I was playing Grand Theft Auto III or Vice City at that point,) but I had never heard of it. Nightfire's the first time I ever actually enjoyed an FPS despite having played GoldenEye, though.

I'd rather a superb James Bond game with a bunch of half decent ones than a bunch of potentially half decent ones.

@GloomyTangent: i had a cousin who was a few years younger than I and he missed the whole goldeneye hype. so for him,nightfire was that game.

was nightfire any good?not really.it was just like goldeneye only it didnt evolve like other games did. try going back to play goldeneye again. its rough as hell.

@laserbolts: huh?

James Bond is so obviously suited for a "Deus Ex" like approach. Hell, even telltale could do something interesting with the property.

@flindip: ive thought of that. thats a great idea.

@flindip: I wouldn't mind a straight-up Deus Ex rip-off 007 game. But I think the franchise is too mainstream (or they think it is) for them to go much deeper with the gameplay than just "shoot that guy."

I actually liked Everything or Nothing more than Goldeneye...so no, I dont think it did, Activision did

@TooWalrus said:

@DoctorDanger99 said:

hell,look at 007 LEGENDS. in many ways it's superior to Goldeneye in everyway.

And 60% of the time, it works every time.

@DoctorDanger99: @Little_Socrates: Don't get me wrong, I can see it as seminal for a person of a certain age/situation, just like Goldeneye was for a huge number of people, or with those dudes in high school who sat around at lunch every day talking about Halo lore (they were in fact crazy people). But as someone who had sort of already gone through that period where I had been exposed to shooters that would set my expectations for the genre (Quake 3, Half-life, Goldeneye, the first NOLF, and, to a lesser extent, the original Timesplitters) I immediately pegged Nightfire as not very good. I'm sure it was fantastic for a bunch of kids to play all night during sleepovers, running on mountain dew and string cheese, especially if it was their first real local multiplayer shooter. And iirc, with certain mutators enabled it did become interesting in its verticality. But it still was a half-assed update to a rapidly aging formula, executed at a mediocre level at best.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I absolutely see how you could get attached to that game, emotionally, based on your age and situation at the time. But if you're comparing Goldeneye to its console contemporaries, and Nightfire to the same, Nightfire was a turd wearing Pierce Brosnan's creepy face.

I should actually track down a copy of everything or nothing to see if it holds up. I remember at the time the cover system they had was just revelatory to me. Was that before or after RE4? I should probably look that up.

Yeah Bond is such a perfect fit for a Deus ex / Mass effect style game, I'd even throw elements of the XCOM world map and have different intelligence agencies and branches show up on it instead of UFOs and alien bases. Basically anything but a cookie cutter FPS would be almost guaranteed to be a monumental success, yet they churn out crappy shooters year in year out so they can maintain the license.

I mean seriously, they already have the hard part done which is franchise awareness, just look at Star Wars, Halo, COD, none of these games will ever slip under anyone's radar no matter how good or bad because of the name attached to them.

All they'd have to do is something different and the name would sell the game for them, but I fear so long as activision holds the license and keeps trying to recreate the success of Goldeneye while doing just enough to hold the license, it'll never happen.

I think the problem is that Activision desperately wants James Bond to be a bland FPS like Call of Duty. They don't give a shit about Bond, they just want to be able to sell the name.

Nobody is actually trying to recreate Goldeneye.  The modern games don't really have that much in common with the original actually.  They prefer to recreate Call of Duty and slap the Goldeneye/Bond name on it.

@GloomyTangent: Compared against other shooters at the time, absolutely, though GoldenEye is contemporary w/Quake 3 and Half-Life and is still a significantly worse game. My problem with GoldenEye was that I could never see where anything was because it was just a giant murky mess. I could actually see what was happening in Nightfire, so it was basically the playable version of GoldenEye. The levels were also fucking HUGE in Nightfire, and you could turn on a ridiculous number of A.I. players. For someone who hadn't yet played an online shooter, it was kind of a revelation to play a game with ten or twelve independent characters running around the map just causing mayhem. The A.I. also wasn't bad in that game, making it a pretty fun way to play a non-online game.

Now, once I'd played Halo 2 a couple years later, I never looked back, but Nightfire's A.I. and visibility just set it so far ahead of GoldenEye that it's kind of a no-brainer. It had at least one absolutely fantastic multiplayer level, too, and the campaign wasn't half-bad.

I'm kind of agreeing with you, but GoldenEye wasn't that much better than Nightfire in terms of its contemporaries, it was just more singular. Console shooters at the time of GoldenEye were pretty limited. Some of them were definitely better, and the PC obviously embarrassed consoles in regards to shooters until maybe Halo 2.

@Benny: If I had my druthers, a proper 007 game would be in the vein of "Deus Ex", and set in 1960's during the Cold War. That is, imo, the proper era for a Bond game.

James Bond is so obviously suited for a "Deus Ex" like approach. Hell, even telltale could do something interesting with the property.

perfect-dark was the best Bond game on N64.

ya know who would make a GREAT bond game? Rockstar.

@CooVee said:

@flindip said:

James Bond is so obviously suited for a "Deus Ex" like approach. Hell, even telltale could do something interesting with the property.

A Telltale Bond game would be great. I don't know if they could handle the action scenes though.

Even better, a Telltale game based on Star Trek the original series.

nope, i just think developers aren't making games like how goldeneye was good. i think it was nightfire the other james bond game for the n64 it just changed things that were bad. the single player was good just the way the game was it wasn't good.

@DoctorDanger99: I kind of think your right. I'm not a huge bond gamer but i did find Goldeneye to be fun on the N64. The problem I think is that the modern run and gun shooter style doesn't do justice for a Spy game. Forget the Bond name they just need to make a good Spy game, run and gun is everything that a spy is not. Spies need a more stealth like gameplay, there needs to be more kills that are silent and less running around blasting people... But at the same time when you get found you should be able to result into run and gun just to get out of the situation. For the Bond games that use COD type of gameplay that is just sad.

@Little_Socrates: I don't think comparing Goldeneye to PC shooters is fair. And no, there was no other good console shooter when Goldeneye came out. You had shitty ports of ID games, Turok, and... well Turok I guess? Based on your critique, I'm guessing that you didn't play a lot of Goldeneye when it was released and maybe only came back to it during the PS2 generation. Because at the time it looked amazing. Sure, it didn't look like Quake and it's frame rate was shoddy, but compared to a lot of PSX games the textures and models were clear, and unlike Turok you had more than 3 feet of vision without pop-in.

And I totally understand what you mean about playing with a ton of bots on a console, but I had already had that experience with Perfect Dark. My friends and I had a custom scenario called world war 3 where we would have the max number of easy bots, all with explosives only. It made the game completely unplayable from a technical standpoint, but was hilarious. Timesplitters 1 had similar support for a huge number of bots, but came out well before Nightfire. If you haven't played TS1, it's worth taking a look at just for the history lesson in just how similar it feels to Goldeneye. They moved away from the sort of floaty autoaim with the manual trigger adjustment in the subsequent games, but it's still totally there in TS1. That in itself is kind of crazy given that it was a dual analog game.

If you can't tell, I'm just as vulnerable to this as you are. TS1 hasn't aged well and even at the time probably wasn't that great, but it was in that PS2 launch window, and I loved the shit out of it.

@agentboolen said:

@DoctorDanger99: I kind of think your right. I'm not a huge bond gamer but i did find Goldeneye to be fun on the N64. The problem I think is that the modern run and gun shooter style doesn't do justice for a Spy game. Forget the Bond name they just need to make a good Spy game, run and gun is everything that a spy is not. Spies need a more stealth like gameplay, there needs to be more kills that are silent and less running around blasting people... But at the same time when you get found you should be able to result into run and gun just to get out of the situation. For the Bond games that use COD type of gameplay that is just sad.

Bond isn't even about stealth kills. Its about espionage, Building contacts, gathering information etc etc. I mean a scenario could be you have to infiltrate a corporate building. Well, one way is you can sneak in. Another way is that you could blow a hole in the building and walk in(making a diversion). Another option is that you can find a female employee, romance her, and she will take you in.

Also, everyone bitching about wanting adventure/RPG mechanics in their Bond games needs to go play Alpha Protocol. It's a buggy, unbalanced mess, but those choices are there and are really brilliantly executed.

@DoctorDanger99: It would have been a great game without batman because the core concepts of the game are so solid. The fighting is fun in that game who you are playing as is irrelevant. I mean take Sleeping Dogs which pretty much to a large extent aped on that exact combat system. Its the same reason that Sleeping Dogs was so fun because they aped what Arkham Asylum made popular. In Goldeneye's case take Perfect Dark for example the same fundamental game design overall except void of bond and it was a stellar game and I'd be willing to argue a better one.

I never thought James Bond was a good character, in film nor in games. He is too perfect. And even when they try to make him more complicated nothing ever carries over from one film to the other.

Nothing matters, no matter how many people die, how many bad guys find out who he is, how many times he disobeys orders, they keep giving him his job back, they keep giving him a new car, and he 006 never dies, and even when he dose he never gets a promotion. The guy has no problems that a 35 year old jumping from building to building shooting guns and sleeping with strange woman would have.

Everything or Nothing was alright, I think a third person stealthy-action approach works well for Bond.

I think if they're going to make 007 games they need to pull a metal gear solid 3 and bite off old school 50-60's Bond. Sure it was campy but it was during the heightened time when espionage thrived. While I didn't particularly enjoyed the ps2 James Bond 007: From Russia with Love game I did enjoy what they were going for by taking it back old school.

Nightfire is the best James Bond game.

No One Lives Forever (and it's sequel) did first person James Bond better than James Bond has ever done.

I wish someone with the talent of naughty dog someday makes a 007 game.

The Daniel Craig bond movies killed Bond for me. Haven't enjoyed any of them since he took over. As for games, I have never been a Bond fan because they just make generic shooters and I'm not a huge fan of that genre outside of a few exceptions. The first time someone makes a Spy/Bond game in the vein of Mass Effect or Alpha Protocol, and does it well, will be the first time it's done well.

Personally, my dream Bond/Spy game would be an RPG/turn based strategy game. Imagine a single unit x-com where you would assault bases. After every mission you would return back to home base and use information gathered to reveal the next location of whatever big bad guy of the moment was, uncover new plots and upgrade your items and stable of helpers back home. Missions can vary from sneaking into a base to kill some one, stealing some kind of documents or any number of spy things. As you progress you rank up and get new skills for your guy, unlock new agents that help you on missions, unlock new research for your Q equivalent to get you upgrades when you return to base, and the more bad guys you stop the more funding you get from your government of choice and choosing what spy agency you back can incur some kind of buff or benefit.

I just want a game like Hitman where you get a task, and you can complete it in any way you'd like, but with the James Bond license. That'd be amazing

I don't get why people are saying it should be like Mass Effect. I mean there isn't much choice in being a Bond you do your mission or you don't. And even Mass Effect becomes more of an action game than it should be which makes it more of the same. I'd say it would have to be a stealth game with certain dialogue options.

@DoctorDanger99 said:

ya know who would make a GREAT bond game? Rockstar.

That would be one of the most sarcastic games ever made. Bond isn't supposed to be this vehicle with the sole use of making observations of society. Up until recently, bonds movies portrayed woman as useless and used only for the purpose of bond's pleasure (and in some respect Bond movies still do). Hell, Sean Connery practically raped a couple girls in the first few James Bonds. That fact would make Rockstar become so sarcastic that it would goes over the edge.

I thought several of the PS2 James Bond games were pretty fun.