Keith Stuart is back for the second part of Three Speech’s Quantom of Solace interview with Adam Gascoine…

How have you managed to merge the two movies, and how much of the scripting comes from your own team?

Well, we actually worked very tightly on the script with the filmmakers. I think we were the third people in the world to see the Quantum of Solace script – literally, the moment it arrived on Daniel Craig’s doorstep, it was on ours – we have a really good connection with them, it’s so positive. You know, licensed games – it can be a very difficult relationship with the people who make the movies, but really, we’re blessed. As far as the script is concerned we were able to stick pretty closely to what it is – there are a couple of story elements that we’ve expanded on deliberately because we didn’t want the player to go, ‘well I know exactly what happens next’. You WON’T know exactly what’s going to happen – there are some predictable events from the movie, but we also have some levels, which aren’t in the movie – although they’re were originally.

Namely?

The train level was actually shot and it was in Casino Royale, but they cut it – it was on the cutting room floor, but we got access to it and turned it into a level. So we worked very closely with them and made sure they approved the story, they have final sign off; Daniel Craig reads the script and he gets to say ‘I don’t think Bond would say that, I think he’d say this’, there’s a very tight involvement in it. But we do have some new story elements that are exclusive to the game…

So it’s a bit like the Star Wars games, which have started to expand on the narrative between the movies, rather than simply replicating the films?

Exactly that. Particularly the Casino Royale stuff, because it’s two years ago now. We took some of the more iconic moments but we also wanted to expand on some of that stuff. There are a couple of scenes in the movie – the science centre, for example, we take that and we turn it into a much more fleshed out level.

In what ways do you feel that the current consoles have allowed you to explore the Bond universe more fully?

I worked on PS2 for a while, and one of the things you always had to do was find a way to stream in levels. You had to compromise on quality because you were constantly loading in new stuff. Well, we don’t have to do that anymore – you have this huge amount of memory. So we load the entire level in, like Call of Duty 4 does, and that means the only thing we do stream in is hi-res textures. We use seven textures on Daniel Craig’s face, which is unheard of – and we can do that because we can stream in these two, three or four megabyte textures. We have extremely realistic characters with full facial expressions. And also, there’s the physics, you can’t underestimate the physics.

Is your physics engine proprietary?

Yes. Treyarch has been building physics engines for a long time now, we have some really good programmers so we decided to use our own. We actually originally designed a fully destructible environment, but we pulled away from it because it sounds good on paper, but in the game it’s a little annoying. In a cover combat game things are going off all around you and you don’t know what’s happening. We stuck, instead, to the physics environment, so when you throw a grenade into a room, it’s going to devastate that room, but it’s not going to pull apart the core gameplay area - you can still take cover, you know where the enemy’s going…

You previously worked on Spider-Man, which is another license with a fanatical fanbase – is there anything from that experience that prepared you for James Bond?

Spider-Man gave us was a group of people who hadn’t just worked on first-person shooters. It would have been very easy, for me in particular, to make an FPS – it’s what I know how to make. Having the Spider-Man guys gave us a really good perspective on how to create a good character model, how to move them through the world, how to make sure they look like they’re reacting correctly. So I would say just in terms of getting a third-person character in the game, it really helped.

Check back tomorrow for the final part of the interview, when we find out about working with Daniel Craig and meeting Hideo Kojima…