A new James Bond game is being created in Sweden, codenamed Project 007. The developers of the Hitman series are responsible for this. Now they’ve landed a big fish: Rodrigo Santorio, he was the brains behind the missions of The Division and Avatar. The missions and open world are considered the best part of The Division games.
This is the message: Danish video game developer IO Interactive proudly announces:
Santoro has been a key figure for The Division since 2014 (via linkedin)
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From architect to level designer in Frankfurt and then to Malmö
What did the man do before??
Santorio was at Massive Entertainment in Malmö, Sweden, from 2014 to February 2024, doing the missions for The Division 1, The Division 2 and then working on the avatar game “Frontiers of Pandora.” During his 9 years and 6 months in Sweden he has risen through the ranks, from Senior Level Designer to Lead Level Designer, to Open World Director and finally to World Director.
The missions of The Division and the open world are considered to be the great strength of The Division games, while the actual gameplay systems and progression have been repeatedly criticized. With the mission designer they have apparently brought in an expert.
If you as a competitor want to copy or import something from The Division, it would definitely be the missions and the outstandingly atmospheric open world, which is still highly valued to this day and many miss exactly this strength of The Division.
Before his time in Malmö, Santoro was in Frankfurt am Main and worked for Crytek on games like Ryse: Sons of Rome. Before, he did what he did in computer games in real life. He designed rooms as an architect.
What do we know about the new game? Very little. Project 007 was announced 3 years ago and is intended to tell a new story of Bond, his origin story.
It would be the dream for the developers, as they say, for the Bond project to become its own growing game brand like their Hitman games.
What impact does this have on The Division? That is hard to say. The Division has been dormant for a few years, Santoro most recently worked on the Avatar game, which rather went under.
The Division 3 is planned, but still a few years away. Whether the loss of the experienced level and mission designer will have a negative impact on The Division 3 or whether others in the team will absorb this will remain to be seen in a few years.
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