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Wolfenstein: Youngblood - two player co-op with BJ's daughters

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
Both games indeed list Arkane as co-developer. Arkane Lyon is on this: https://bethesda.net/en/article/1Lo...tein-youngblood-release-date-gameplay-trailer
Translation: Bethesda shot down Dishonored 3 and we couldn't figure out what to do next, so we're now making Wolfenstein expansions in the meantime.
Reminder that when I posted this people rated it "Fake News" and "Cool Story": https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...guelike-mode-dlc.109304/page-115#post-5766763
 

Wunderbar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 15, 2015
Messages
8,809
Although I am not quite sure how they'll handle the timeframe. 80's does seem kinda late for the whole "dystopian dieselpunk nazis".

The aesthetic they should use, but probably won't:

tumblr_mw7invCmvV1sq3uveo1_500.jpg
that would require them to actually create new assets instead of rehashing WTNC.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
I liked the first one of theirs a good bit in general, but the engine was such a clusterfuck it really made me hate playing it on some level. I'm not a super techy guy either, I have rarely ever felt such a thing before. Keep meaning to try out the sequel, which is a different engine I believe, but I feel like I have to play Old Blood first, which I don't really want to do, so I end up doing nothing.
 
Joined
Sep 16, 2016
Messages
296
So, I got back into The New Colossus because I paid too much money for it and this thread reminded me I own it. Towards the end of the game, it gets significantly better. The writing feels like the writers finally figured out that they didn't have to be so damn serious about everything, and the tone shifts wildly from "hyper serious with some awkward, poorly timed, and unfunny humor thrown in" to "silly and over the top with appropriate moments of seriousness". I don't mind getting away from the more serious tone of the first one in favor of silliness, as long as they pick a tone and go with it.

I'd also comment that I don't necessarily think it's super SJW or anything, either. It was definitely written from a particular left-wing point of view, but the game doesn't seem insistent on preaching that viewpoint to me. My major issue was with the advertising, which did seem quite insistent on equating the hyperviolent actions of BJ and company in Wolfenstein with things that people should actually go do in real life here and now. It's in incredibly poor taste to exploit modern political happenings for a video game advertising campaign, and I think they ended up associating themselves with some ideas and people that the game itself doesn't give two shits about.

On a gameplay note, for all of the absolutely shit level design, I didn't think Venus was that bad. It wasn't great, don't get me wrong, but after some of the early levels, it was a fairly passable shooter area. Even the walking sim areas grate a lot less, with the sillier tone allowing one to enjoy the characters and interactions, rather than dreading the next ultra-serious conversation with a poop joke.

I'm incredibly cautious towards Machine Games because they seem like a very inconsistent studio but if they pick a tone, double-down on making actually good levels, and make use of the coop in Youngblood to allow for tactics and interesting gameplay options, it might actually turn out okay. I don't know if I'd even describe myself as cautiously optimistic, but I would say that I think they have a chance to make it good.
 

Hines

Savant
Joined
Jan 26, 2017
Messages
258
The lead level designer for Youngblood is Mitja Roskaric who works at MachineGames, so I don't think that's the case at all.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
I imagine it's mainly providing art assets as well as additional design and programming.

And it sounds like Arkane is the main developer of the VR game: https://bethesda.net/en/game/wolfenstein-faq

Who is developing Wolfenstein: Youngblood?
Wolfenstein: Youngblood is being developed by MachineGames in partnership with Arkane Studios.

Who is developing Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot?
Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot is a MachineGames production developed by Arkane Studios.
 

Angthoron

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2007
Messages
13,056
Well at least there's a slight chance the characters won't be as ugly as the ones Arkane usually makes.
 

Rinslin Merwind

Erudite
Joined
Nov 4, 2017
Messages
1,274
Location
Sea of Eventualities
The reason they've ruled the world with next to no resistance (other than by the mentally ill and retarded) is because they've been doing a fucking good job of it, apparently. It's the 1960s and humanity has a goddamn Moon base, they've sent manned missions to Venus, they've been busy creating magnificent marvels of architecture, mega-engineering projects and colonizing the Solar System.

For a franchise that is ostensibly all about showing the horrors of a world ruled by the Nazis NuWolfenstein hasn't been doing a good job of it. Blaskowitz and his merry band of social rejects are portrayed as mentally ill, monstrous terrorists with no regard for human life, the poor Jews that get persecuted are actually guilty of hoarding technology that could have alleviated the misery of millions of humans (but didn't want to share with the filthy goyim) and are busy giving innocent people cancer and destroying domiciles and their inhabitants by sabotaging the magic cement. Hell, the mother of the wonder twins was a batshit insane whore that slept with perfectly innocent German soldiers that did her no ill just so she could kill them. She even relished getting pregnant by one of them just so she could abort the baby.

I get that leftists are lacking in self-awareness, but can they at least try and make the "good" guys sympathetic when they decided to shit out propaganda?

I want to brofist you until count will be broken, this game even make me feel bad about fighting nazi regime, because "good" guys was so unlikable (especially racist nigger who blamed BJ for nazi's crimes after BJ came back from mission). At some point I was be like: "Is this some kind of subtle nazi propaganda? Because regime looks so good in comparison to resistance in this game, just like in ACTUAL nazi propoganda." If we change ideology of resistance to Islam and nazi regime on any other political ideology, nothing will change. This still will be a game about mental ill morons who "fight regime" by targeting civilians in their terrorist acts while claiming that their war is "liberating" for the sake their "holy beliefs". The worst part of all, that only few people saw this, because majority apparently too stupid to think more deeply than "Nazi is bad, because Nazi is bad and anyone who fight them is good, even if they using same methods as nazi".


Even on codex exist people, they apparently disabled their brain during their walkthrough of TNO, who claim that TNO was decent and after second everything went to shit. No, it's wasn't decent, it was horrible written propaganda game to support hysteria about war that long gone and you paid for it, so you got a sequel that you deserved (thank God that I managed to get copy for this game for free).

Honestly, I liked Wolfenstein 3D, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and even Wolfenstein (2009) much more than this shit.
You can hate Wolfenstein from 2009 as long as you want, but at least this game tried to show horrible side of regime, not just sell copies "cuz nazi is bad, because nazi is bad and shooting nazi is good".

Hell, nostalgia hits hard, I should replay RtCW.
 

gerey

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Feb 2, 2007
Messages
3,472
because "good" guys was so unlikable (especially racist nigger who blamed BJ for nazi's crimes after BJ came back from mission)
20 years after the war ended there are still Jews around in concentration camps, because the filthy goyim are obviously too stupid to compete with the divine intellect of the Chosen People and can't invent anything on their own, let alone understand the Talmudic magic behind cement (despite having a Moon base). Not even an actual Jewish supremacist would be so on-the-nose about it, making the two writers out as the most servile cucks in the industry.

Then there's that one scene where the Jew reveals how they've been creating all this stuff for centuries and refused to share it, even when the Germans were winning and they waited for the last possible moment to hand stuff over to the Allies. Only the crippled woman calls him out on it before quickly being silenced by the rest of them, and it's promptly forgotten.

Or how about the final mission? They get their hands on a suit of power armor and what do they do with it? Do they give it to the guy they're sending on a suicide mission? Nope. They give it to the crippled old hag so she can walk around for a while.

I especially like how they even laced the "encyclopedia" entries with soy-fueled butthurt by saying German officers are all cowards that got their jobs through nepotism and bribery, when WW2 German officers suffered disproportionately more casualties than their Allied counterparts due to personal bravery and a culture of leading from the front.

Even on codex exist people, they apparently disabled their brain during their walkthrough of TNO, who claim that TNO was decent and after second everything went to shit. No, it's wasn't decent, it was horrible written propaganda game to support hysteria about war that long gone and you paid for it, so you got a sequel that you deserved (thank God that I managed to get copy for this game for free).
Even putting the shitty propaganda narrative aside the games are horrible. TNO is a badly paced game with lackluster map design (everything is some shade of grey), no enemy variety (you spend 90% of the game shooting German soldiers with a differently colored uniforms and the remaining 10% fighting those supersoldiers in lieu of actually fun bosses), shitty arsenal (it's about as generic as it gets, the dual wielding being the only "standout" feature). At one point you spend a whole level navigating sewers while the batshit insane Polish woman keeps talking nonsense at you and nothing happens. The less said about the forced stealth sections the better.

TNC somehow managed to be even fucking worse, turning the game into a glorified walking simulator with a worse cutscene-to-gameplay ratio than Metal Gear Solid 4.
 

Vityaz

Augur
Joined
Oct 7, 2014
Messages
169
DAE THE NAZIS WERE SECRETLY GOOD GUYS ALL ALONG?

I am really not seeing the issue there, guys. I mean, if you were underground resistance fighters living in a dystopian Nazi world, of course you'd have to get your hands dirty at some point. You'd be fucking naive to think otherwise.
Or would you prefer the good old British method of 1937, where they just kept sitting down with a finger in their ass and wagging their other at Adolf while he was conquering and occupying all the low countries? Passive appeasment only gets you so far.

Also I don't remember the last time "civilians" were targeted in this game? Even the town that gets nuked is promptly vacated beforehand by the evacuation alarm that your people set off. Most of the missions take place on military bases or installations, which is a fair game, I say.

If anything, I am actually more suprised they didn't make us do something more vile, like blowing up a station with a lot of civilian collateral damage around. That'd be more realistic.

EDIT: To all you niggers getting assblasted because I dissed your precious pixel "good guys", just keep on feeding those firebombs.

Zp8Xtvh.png
 
Last edited:
Joined
Sep 16, 2016
Messages
296
I'd contend that the bigger issue is that most of the resistance fighters are unlikable assholes. The characters I liked were holdovers from the first game, and at least one of them died. Most of this seems to go back to the fact that the writers don't know what tone they're going for - writing realistically flawed dickheads is fine if the tone is more serious - but this is a game where one of those characters can have a belligerent Nazi robot arm. Goofy antics and literal poop jokes don't combine well with subplots about horribly broken people trying to seek some degree of normalcy.

TNC also had crappy villains compared to General Deathshead from TNO and they took a "tell, don't show" approach to the evil shit the Nazis were doing, which is in stark contrast to how it was handled in TNO and TOB. Both games featured some fairly stark depictions of Nazi villainy. And then you get to TNC, which is from the same writers, and it tries to do the same types of things but fails. It really undermines the idea that you're killing bad guys when you're mostly only really told they're bad while you're shown how bad your supposed allies can be. I'd still stand by the notion that I don't think it's a deliberate attempt at political commentary; it's just shitty writing from people who couldn't decide what they wanted to make. As I stated previously in this thread, I do think TNC's writing gets better when it abandons the melodrama in favor of balls-to-the-walls silliness, but it takes far too long to get there.
 

Vityaz

Augur
Joined
Oct 7, 2014
Messages
169
I'd contend that the bigger issue is that most of the resistance fighters are unlikable assholes. The characters I liked were holdovers from the first game, and at least one of them died. Most of this seems to go back to the fact that the writers don't know what tone they're going for - writing realistically flawed dickheads is fine if the tone is more serious - but this is a game where one of those characters can have a belligerent Nazi robot arm. Goofy antics and literal poop jokes don't combine well with subplots about horribly broken people trying to seek some degree of normalcy.
IMHO, I think they were doubling down a bit too much on the whole 60s aesthetic, blaxploiation etc. and kinda got lost in it, which makes the game so tonally.... weird.
I do agree that all the time when BJ is trying to be serious and self-indulgent, and then it's interrupted by some weird slapstick humour, it can be pretty fucking jarring. But as you said, it definitely improves (a bit) when they fully embrace the silliness.

It's still the weakest game from the NuWolfenstein series tho.

It really undermines the idea that you're killing bad guys when you're mostly only really told they're bad while you're shown how bad your supposed allies can be.

I am not quite sure I understand this. Didn't we get shown plenty of that? From the casual conversations you can overhear to places like New Orleans where they horde all the undesirables in a ghetto and then have an open season on them, with giant Flamethrower Robot Dogs and shit? The whole place is littered with dead bodies and there's a bunch of animated executions as well.
That's like saying the commies in Freedom Fighters are not actually that bad, because we never really get to see them do anything explicitly vile?

I am pretty sure they don't need to shove a concentration camp/Mengele-styled laboratory level in our face every game just to constantly remind us how "evil" Nazis are. In fact, this might be probably the only game that actually tries to humanize them in a way, be it from random convos or diaries etc.
I don't particularly remember the last game that made an effort on this. :|
 
Last edited:
Joined
Sep 16, 2016
Messages
296
IMHO, I think they were doubling down a bit too much on the whole 60s aesthetic, blaxploiation etc. and kinda got lost in it, which makes the game so tonally.... weird.
I do agree that all the time when BJ is trying to be serious and self-indulgent, and then it's interrupted by some weird slapstick humour, it can be pretty fucking jarring. But as you said, it definitely improves (a bit) when they fully embrace the silliness.

It's still the weakest game from the NuWolfenstein series tho.
I definitely agree. They also need to get away from the boring stealth mechanics and focus on cranking up the action, but that's a general issue with modern shooters. Someone took a look at the mix of stealth and action in Far Cry and decided it works for everything, and that's not really the case. But that goes back to the developers deciding on what they want the game to be, which is as important for the content of the game as it is for the tone of the story.

I am not quite sure I understand this. Didn't we get shown plenty of that? From the casual conversations you can overhear to places like New Orleans where they horde all the undesirables in a ghetto and then have an open season on them, with giant Flamethrower Robot Dogs and shit? The whole place is littered with dead bodies and there's a bunch of animated executions as well.
That's like saying the commies in Freedom Fighters are not actually that bad, because we never really get to see them do anything explicitly vile?

I am pretty sure they don't need to shove a concentration camp/Mengele-styled laboratory level in our face every game just to constantly remind us how "evil" Nazis are. In fact, this might be probably the only game that actually tries to humanize them in a way, be it from random convos or diaries etc.
I don't particularly remember the last game that made an effort on this. :|
I'm trying to explain a feeling I had while playing, so this is all fairly subjective. The game never painted the Nazis in a positive light, but it felt to me like most of the things they did were more frequently referenced than actually shown. I hardly remember the New Orleans level, which might have something to do with it, but it never felt like the evil on display directly impacted the central characters or what they were doing. It was more like you'd hear a reference to slavery being re-implemented in America, as part of a completely unrelated level. I definitely agree that they don't need a concentration camp level every game, but I do think this approach didn't work out. It's not that the Nazis aren't portrayed as bad guys, but that you actively see and interact with a lot of the resistance fighters and see them being the worst. Then you get told that the Nazis are really shitty and go murder a bunch of them. It's a disconnect, and I didn't feel quite as justified to commit senseless acts of violence as in the first two games in this pseudo-reboot series. For the most part, I'd say this has less to do with them being Nazis or not, and more just that TNC didn't do a great job of incentivizing me to go after the villains. TNO did, but TNC felt more like a Call of Duty game that assumed I'd be down to shoot Nazis just because. They're correct, but it doesn't make it a better approach.

As far as them deliberately humanizing Nazi soldiers, I felt like they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Some of the random conversations and diaries paint them as humans, and some of them were essentially just conversations about how many puppies Hanz McJewShooter kicked this week. It didn't feel like the writers were aiming for subtlety in their portrayal, either, but rather just sort of flopped back and forth.
 

orcinator

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 23, 2016
Messages
1,704
Location
Republic of Kongou
There's barely any gameplay footage but I assume this will be sub-mediocre drek like the last two and the coop will be the same as many other bad coop games, in that it'll feel exactly like you're playing alone but without the fear of failure since you can endlessly revive each other.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
You guys need to get this through your heads. Western AAA gaming is dead.

It's not quite dead, decent stuff slips out sometimes, but it's on life support. It's definitely dead at EA and Activision, not that it was doing much there for a long time anyway.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
FWIW: https://wccftech.com/wolfenstein-youngblood-lots-similarities-dishonored-games/

Wolfenstein: Youngblood Will Have Lots of Similarities to Dishonored Games in Level Design, Says Dev

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is due for release in late July, a strange period for launching triple-A games, but that’s far from the only distinguishing aspect of this project.

For instance, it’s the first time in the Wolfenstein reboot franchise that Swedish studio MachineGames was joined during development by another internal Bethesda team, Arkane Lyon, known for the critically acclaimed Dishonored series.

It is most likely for this very reason that Executive Producer Jerk Gustafsson revealed the following tidbit in an interview published on the latest PlayStation Official Magazine (June 2019, issue 162):

I think players will see a lot of similarities to level design in the Dishonored games, so in that sense it can be a little bit different as an experience but it can be for the benefit of the game, especially when it comes to finding different ways of approaching a combat scenario or a mission in general.​

The producer also highlighted how this open-ended structure, in combination with the co-op feature (another first for MachineGames), affected the game’s overall setup. The main campaign will be shorter than previous Wolfenstein titles, but it’ll be more replayable with plenty of side activities and missions.

The open-ended structure and co-op aspect has made it a little more difficult when it comes to the narrative. We do think we have a strong story, but it’s quite different from what we have done before; it’s a little bit lighter, not only in tone but also when it comes to the amount of content, and I think that’s the big change when it comes to previous titles: the campaign is a bit shorter but the amount of gameplay time is greater.

Players will be able to stay in the game for a long time. We’ll add additional side-missions and new challenges once the campaign is completed. There’s a lot more activities and side-missions that you can do in Wolfenstein: Youngblood than in previous Wolfenstein games.​
 

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