With Quantum of Solace, Activision focused on making the gameplay outstanding and built the game on the Call of Duty 4 game engine. All images © Activision.

Let's talk a little bit about videogames that are based on movies. Movie games suck! It's a fact. Typically when a movie production house releases a new movie in theaters they also commission a videogame developer to create a game based on that movie. The hope of the movie production house is that the game will ride the coattails of the movie and create a larger cash flow. To be quite honest, this is great business but there is a big problem: the game developers have a limited time to work on the game because it needs to be released in stores even before the movie hits theaters. Developers are instructed that the game doesn't need to be good; it just needs to look good. It doesn't matter if everything else about the game is a pile of crap because the game will sell regardless due to the fact that it has the same name as the movie so what you get is a game that is unenthusiastic, slapped together and about as much fun as a spreadsheet.

You think to yourself, "There has got to be some movie games out there that are actually good," and you're right. Even though they have bounced around between different developers, the 007 games have always held a pretty high standard among movie games such as the absolutely legendary GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 and the outstanding From Russia with Love that was released on the previous generation of home videogame systems. And Activision, which grabbed the license through 2014 to develop games based on all of the Bond movies as well as non-movie-based games, obviously has a special relationship with MGM Interactive and EON Prods. and doesn't have to worry about limited time or resources. So, the ridiculously hard working devs at Activision didn't have to churn out Quantum of Solace (streeting this week), which is a game based on the new, upcoming Bond movie of the same name (opening Nov. 14). I got to sit down with Jeremy Luyties, the lead design director of Quantum of Solace, to get a real good grip on the game's development and to see if it will be as marvelous as some of the other 007 games before it.

First and foremost, the devs at Activision are focused on making the gameplay outstanding. "The main goal is to make a game! The core mechanics, core gameplay and clever AI all work together to make the game as strong as possible; then all we have to do is sprinkle the James Bond universe on to it," said Luyties. To do this Activision has built Quantum of Solace on the Call of Duty 4 game engine. The absolute most popular first-person shooter (FPS) online right now is, of course, CoD4, which was developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision so naturally the CoD4 engine is the perfect gameplay engine to make Quantum of Solace outstanding.

QoS is a challenging game without being cheap. All of the difficulty revolves around the very clever AI system that Activision and Treyarch have developed.

QoS is actually a hybrid of the two Daniel Craig 007 movies, Quantum of Solace and its predecessor Casino Royale. This makes perfect sense because QoS is a direct sequel to the Casino Royale origin story. As outstanding as the Casino Royale movie was, no one ever released a Casino Royale game, which is an absolute embarrassment. The story of the game allows players to start off in the events of QoS and then flashes back to critical events in Casino Royale, which the player also gets to venture through. The environments already look astounding with locales such as Venice and Austria. Marketplaces and watery caverns will house numerous firefights between Bond and legions of anonymous henchmen.

Speaking of henchmen, an interesting thing to note about the different difficulty levels in QoS is the fact that great care was taken to make the game challenging without being cheap. Typical shooter games create harder difficulty levels by changing nothing about the game expect for having the main character deal less damage and suffer more damage when attacked. In QoS, all of the difficulty revolves around the very clever AI system that Activision and Treyarch have developed. For instance, if you choose to duck and hide behind cover for too long the AI enemies will attempt to flush you out with a grenade or they will try to sneak around to your side to get a clearer shot at you. The harder difficulty settings make the enemies react even faster than normal and will also have them use other methods to draw you out of hiding. The devs would actually stress test the intelligence of the AI bots by creating simple, flat environments with three or four cover points and then fight the bots in these environments for hours and hours to really get an idea of how well their AI system was working. The goal was to make the AI characters fight as close to actual human opponents as possible and make it feel like a multiplayer, online game.