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The new James Bond game, 007 First Light, seems to be enjoying a very positive response. We were charmed in our 007 First Light review, and judging by the impressive 007 First Light launch sales, many of you were too. The chances of developer IO Interactive realising that James Bond trilogy dream one day seem strong. But even so, the next game from IO probably won’t be a James Bond game at all, or a Hitman game – that other series the studio built its reputation on.
As it stands, IO’s next biggest development team is working on a completely new idea and series, one called Project Fantasy. I saw artwork for it on the walls of IO’s Brighton studio when I visited recently – it’s one of five studios IO operates around Europe. I even caught a glimpse of a creature being animated on someone’s screen. The message was clear: this game is deep in active development.
Exactly how many people are working on Project Fantasy, I wasn’t allowed to know, but chief development officer Véronique Lallier could tell me the team is “bigger than the Hitman one at the moment but smaller than the 007 First Light one”. I was told this in the lead-up to 007 First Light’s launch, mind you, so now that the game’s been released, the team’s size may change.
However, IO does intend to keep a healthy 007 First Light workforce around, I was told, to support it in a similar way IO has supported Hitman in the past – with a steady stream of new gameplay experiences. Partly the team is there to address any launch issues there are with the game, but also because of the plan IO has to keep you playing 007: First Light long after the credits roll.
“Something that IO is well established for is always coming with different game experiences” -Véronique Lallier
But what is Project Fantasy? Project Fantasy was announced by IO Interactive in 2023, when it was described as “an online fantasy RPG” – “A world and game built from the core to entertain players and expand for many years to come.” Exactly what that means – a massively-multiplayer game or a smaller-scale shared world game – we don’t know, and we haven’t heard much about it since.
“It’s a project that we’ve been starting, I think, post-Covid,” Lallier told me, which tallies with the 2021 rumour that IO was making a new fantasy game. The project is led by IO co-owner and chief creative officer Christian Elverdam. The company’s other co-founder, Hakan Abrak – the CEO – led 007 First Light. A project apiece, then.
“Christian is really close to Project Fantasy with regard to creative vision and approach,” Lallier said. “There is a common passion [among] our studio management in general about Fantasy, but Christian is very close to this project and it’s very important for us to do things differently.
“Something that IO is well established for is always coming with different game experiences, leveraging technology and everything, and Project Fantasy is a new IP and that’s something we’ve always been very excited about at IO. We had Freedom Fighter, Mini Ninjas, all those different games, and it’s always original IP. I think actually 007 First Light is the only game in an established franchise.”
The two Kane & Lynch games are the obvious absentees from Lallier’s list there – gritty, Xbox 360-era shooters that were “relentlessly miserable” but also “brilliant” in their own way, Alex Donaldson recently wrote.
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“So yeah, Project Fantasy is really, really close to our heart, and it’s a very exciting project, but we’re not talking too much about it, because at the moment, really, the focus of the studio is launching 007 First Light,” Lallier said.
A Project Fantasy website displays the announcement statement from 2023 alongside a single piece of artwork that depicts a trio of adventurers – elf, human and dwarf, by the looks of it (the quintessential fantasy trio) – standing at the edge of a cave, looking out at a scene of adventure: a verdant, mountainous world beyond. The words “Looking for more!” are scrawled in the bottom of the image, aping a common group-finding call in multiplayer online worlds.
A handful of short developer videos recorded at the time talk vaguely about the project, with lead sound designer Joshua Smith saying, “We’re trying to create something that I think doesn’t exist in the space, currently. It’s a world where we’re going to allow you to be things you could never be. IOI is known for Hitman and things like that and this is a completely different direction.”
If you’re someone like me who enjoys fantasy games, this is exciting, but there’s a note of trepidation too, because online multiplayer projects are notoriously costly and complicated to make. We’ve seen a string of high profile online multiplayer games struggle in recent years, including Amazon’s New World, BioWare’s Anthem, Sony’s Concord, and even Destiny 2. These are risky projects to take on.
