007 First Light has a big free update. IO Interactive's Extended Operations adds New Game+, a brutal new 00 difficulty, a photo mode and fresh missions built around Bond's Aston Martin Valhalla. It went live on Thursday, 1 October, at 12:00 UTC, which was 9:30pm in Adelaide, on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.

It's the game's first major free expansion since it came out in May. The studio says it also packs in more than 700 fixes and improvements, covering everything from crashes to subtitles.

What's in it

IO Interactive and Amazon MGM Studios announced the update in a press release on 1 October. They called it "some of the most requested additions from the 007 First Light community since launch." It arrives as version 1.3.0. The official patch notes put the download at 11.9 GB on PS5, 14 GB on Steam, 13.5 GB on Xbox Series, 13.6 GB on the Epic Games Store and 8 GB through the Microsoft PC store.

Photo: Calreyn88 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), cropped

If you've already beaten the story, New Game+ is the big one. It opens up once you finish the campaign on any difficulty. You can start again from the top or jump to any checkpoint you've cleared, and you keep every outfit and gadget you've earned. You can swap gadgets whenever you like during a mission, the patch notes say. But you only get the ones the story has handed you by that point, "so Q's inventions still reach you in the order the campaign introduces them."

Then there's 00, built to hurt. IOI's release says enemies notice bodies and noise faster, some guards get swapped for tougher types, and you can't use gadgets while a guard can see you. Combat gets harsher too, with "two-hit kills, tighter parry and side-step timing." You unlock it through New Game+, but nobody's forcing you to play on it. The studio says your unlocked outfits and gadgets carry over into a replay on Easy, Normal or Hard just as well.

The Valhalla gets its own missions

The Aston Martin Valhalla has been in the game from day one. Back then IOI's May release described it as "heavily modified with Q-Branch's latest advancements". Now it's the star of the new Valhalla Protocol content in TacSim, the training simulator that runs alongside the story.

You get four missions in the Slovakian mountains, some by day and some at night, and each one has its own set of challenges. The car keeps the weapons Bond uses in the campaign. In the patch notes' words, that's "machine guns and missile launchers at your command". You use them to wipe out targets and pick up time bonuses as you chase a high score.

The other new TacSim mission is called Jungle Heist. It sends Bond back to The Pearl, the luxury resort in Vietnam, to grab classified documents from a safe inside a guarded villa. IOI says you can now go anywhere on the property, rooftop included, and it's redesigned the villa's interior to give stealth players more room to work. "Every attempt will be different from before," the patch notes say.

TacSim picks up two new weapons as well, the Storm 12 Gauge shotgun and the Squire Marksman Rifle. You unlock those with in-game Intel. There are also three outfits you can wear straight away: Observant Spy, Leisure Beam and First Class. And you can now take the full campaign arsenal into TacSim.

Photo mode, and a dog you can pat

Photo mode was another feature players kept asking for. Hit one button and the action freezes. From there you can pose Bond, move the camera, swap the lens, tweak the brightness, add filters and frame your shot. IOI's release even suggests where to point it, "from the Grand Carpathian's chess tables to the neon-lit streets of Aleph."

Weapons should handle better too. IOI says reloads, moving in and out of aim, swapping guns and throwing should all look and feel smoother. And Bond can now get thrown off a ledge, the same as the guards. "That seemed only fair," the patch notes say.

MI6 headquarters has a small new resident. Jack the Bulldog now lives beside Dr Selina Tan's TacSim area. "You can pet him," IOI wrote.

If you link the game to an IOI Account by 1 November, you'll get a free outfit called the Grey Standard.

Seven hundred fixes

The less exciting half is the fix list, which runs past 700 items. There are crash fixes, including one that could hit after a few minutes of play. Save slots that could end up partly unusable are fixed. So are NPCs that got stuck in the wrong state after a reload, plus a long run of clipping, lighting and audio problems. On PS5, a bug that could stop the Platinum Trophy unlocking is gone. On Xbox Series S, characters that could look too dark in Performance Mode should now look right.

The studio gave players a lot of the credit. "Thank you to everyone who has played, reported, and shared feedback with us," the patch notes say. "It has shaped this update more than you might think."

A strong year for IOI's Bond

007 First Light launched on 27 May. It's from the Copenhagen studio best known for Hitman. Patrick Gibson plays a 26-year-old Bond fighting his way through MI6 training, and the theme song comes from Lana Del Rey with long-time Bond film composer David Arnold.

It's selling well. On 20 August IOI said the game had passed four million units in its first three months, calling it "one of 2026's fastest-selling games." GameSpot reported on 1 October that Amazon Game Studios boss Jeff Gattis has hinted a sequel is a matter of when, not if.

Switch 2 owners are still waiting. IOI's August release said that version would follow later in 2026. The studio now says it's coming in March 2027. Plenty of big games have reached Nintendo's newer console long after they first launched, Elden Ring's Tarnished Edition among them this year.

Extended Operations lands before a busy stretch. Grand Theft Auto VI arrives on 19 November, so a free update is a good excuse for anyone who's finished the campaign to jump back in first. IOI's official trailer for the update is at the top of this page. The studio says "more improvements and content are already in development."