IO Interactive senior licensing producer Theuns Smit has distanced the studio's upcoming game, 007 First Light, from previous James Bond game GoldenEye 007. He claims the studio is not worrying about the title's legacy and is instead focused on what it's "bringing forward."

When it comes to games based on the infamous special agent with a license to kill, the same one always comes to mind. While dozens of Bond games have been released over the years, GoldenEye 007 is the only one that is often considered to be great.

The last game to be released with the 007 moniker was 007 Legends, which launched in 2012. Publisher Activision made the bold choice to launch the game without an ending so that players could properly finish it alongside the launch of Skyfall in movie theaters. As you might have guessed, everyone disliked that.

Speaking to Radio Times Gaming, Smit admits that 007's previous success, GoldenEye, is a "fantastic game", but the upcoming 007 First Light is "something really special." IO Interactive is trying to focus on its own game rather than trying to live up to the legacy of the N64 classic.

"I mean, obviously, acknowledging it is a fantastic game," Smit says of GoldenEye 007. "There's a lot of praise and a lot of nostalgia that goes with that. But for us, we're focused on what we're putting forward, which is in essence a third-person story-driven action-adventure game."

While GoldenEye 007 is known for its tight level design, 007 First Light is taking a completely different approach by offering something "expansive." "[It] is a far wider and more expansive offering and gameplay experience that we're bringing forward," Smit says. "So once people get their hands on it and get to play it, and get to experience that for themselves… I mean, there's something really special we have on our hands here and we can't wait for you to get yours on it as well."

The interview was conducted before IO Interactive decided to delay 007 First Light by two months for "further polish". It is now scheduled to be released on 27 May, 2026.

007 First Light is "not a role-playing game" because it's James Bond's story, says dev who reveals what to expect from Lenny Kravitz's villain.

The end of 2025 was absolutely stacked with brilliant games; we had Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades 2, Battlefield 6, and, of course, Arc Raiders. There were almost too many great games to play them all, a problem that all studios releasing games at the time undoubtedly had to grapple with.

Arc Raiders had the monumental task of competing with the likes of Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, two huge names in the genre that had swathes of fans waiting to pick up the latest game. But there was also another shark in the water.

"When we spoke about whether we should move the game, the first dialogue we had was obviously centred around GTA," Embark Studios CEO, Patrick Söderlund, says in an interview with GamesBeat. "We did not want to be close to them. I don't think anyone wanted to be close to them. And we were waiting for them to announce when they were releasing, and once that became clear, we then felt we could build a date. We had a pretty reasonable hunch that Battlefield was coming around the time frame, we knew that Call of Duty was going to ship roughly when it did because it always does."

Scheduling Arc Raiders to release between Battlefield 6 and Black Ops 7 wasn't a mistake or even a gamble: "It was absolutely something we did intentionally," Söderlund says. "As we started to see more of Battlefield 6, we thought that looked good; we didn't see much of Call of Duty. But at the end of the day, we felt that the game was ready to be launched."

Amongst the stacked gaming schedule, Arc Raiders managed to still break through, gaining over 100,000 players in just the first 30 minutes and going on to have some of the best player retention I've seen in quite some time.

"We had a long, long conversation about [changing the release date], and we came to the conclusion after going back and forth that we believed we had a game that was very strong," Söderlund says. "We also believed that we could get to a place where we could be competitive in a different way. We, of course, didn't think it was a Battlefield in that way, but that the game had enough uniqueness that it could stand on its own legs.

"We felt that the game was offering something very different from what those other games were, and we also had very strong KPIs from our last technical test, and we did a final test of the game just before launch, which we called Server Slam, gave us more data to feel comfortable with launching."

Arc Raiders' uniqueness sure did see it through. Yes, players had seen extraction shooters before, not least Escape from Tarkov, but Arc Raiders offered a different, more laid-back approach. Lobbies are friendlier, loot is more plentiful, and dying has far fewer consequences here than in other extraction shooters. There's clearly an audience for this softer approach, and now we know just how big it is.

Final Fantasy 14's North American servers have been hammered by DDoS attacks since the release of Patch 7.4—I'd know, I play on them—which has players starting to grind their teeth in frustration. Especially given the release of the latest Savage (high-difficulty) raid tier, and the race to world first that buoys it.

Take a look at the game's official status page, and you'll see notice after notice detailing "recoveries from DDoS" attacks, most of which kicked off in September, primarily affecting North American data centers. On a personal note, most of my gaming sessions, as someone who plays on one of these things, have been interrupted by a DDoS error at some point.

There's also an X account that tracks them, cataloguing them via a website called is.xiv.up.

Have a gander at the r/ffxiv subreddit at the time of writing, and you'll see a legion of players that are (quite rightly) miffed: "Exactly when do we get pissed about this constantly happening?" writes one player. "We have been, it doesn't seem to help," replies another.

In a separate thread, user LastTraintoSector6 writes: "I'm not trying to be alarmist, but I've only been playing about four hours tonight and have been 'DDOS'd' off of Crystal five times … I'm not threatening to unsub, but I do expect better than this from Square-Enix. Because getting booted mid-content is absolutely a complete downer."

At the very least, there've been some killer memes out of the whole fiasco:

Surely One More Year from r/ffxiv

Players aren't particularly charmed on its official forums, either. A now 33-page thread is flooded with complaints. It doesn't help that there are a ton of activities in FF14 where a disconnect will scupper the whole thing: Expensive crafting recipes borked, neck-and-neck enrages with the new endgame raid bosses failed and—I am not kidding, this is a serious issue—windows to catch ultra-rare fish, completely missed.

So, why's this happening? Well, given some players have had success with rerouting using VPNs, it's likely a faulty node somewhere along FF14's service provider, NTT. In a—oof, three-year-old, 150-page—thread detailing issues with the provider, user HyperiusUltima notes:

"Yep, it's the Sacramento Node Again. I just ran a tracert and the ping jumps up pretty high at times forcing disconnects. They can't call it DDOS anymore if NTT isn't gonna do their damn job. If anything, can SE just think about changing providers in the future? They are literally SE's Cash Cow right now and they're letting it burn."

If this is the case, then Square Enix might be in a bind, depending on the duration of its contracts with NTT. Either way, it's not a great look for the developer, given director Yoshi-P promised during Dawntrail's release that "we have gone through a process of having perfect defences". Granted, if it is a third-party provider screwing things up, it's out of his hands—but at this point it's time for Square to really put the screws on, or suffer a rightfully-miffed playerbase.