Wolfenstein: The New Order

[Deleted member 7219]

Yeah, got the info just now. Point and laugh at me. :<

It is so ridiculous that it needs saying many times.

It isn't a Collector's Edition, it is merchandise.

 

[Psquit]

game looks like shit, dat ai...

 

[Morgoth]

http://www.destructoid.com/review-wolfenstein-the-new-order-274633.phtml

"A solid game"

Translation: Another forgettable nonsense shooter.

 

[sexbad?]

Terrible, terrible performance for me at the moment.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/201810/discussions/0/558756256503448310/

 

[Morgoth]

Installed Catalyst 14.4?

 

[sexbad?]

I did, after I posted that. It runs alright, but not as well as I'd really hope.

I'm extremely surprised to find out that I'm actually having fun. Not all of the time, because there are those wonderful moments when you watch other people do cool stuff, but I'm willing to say nice things about it. The level design is fluid and branching (though not on the level of RtCW), the guns feel great, and the AI doesn't always stand still. It's a fair enough start. It'll probably fuck up sometime, though, once you get those dual wield miniguns or whatever overpowered shit they're promising under the "oldschool" guise.

All the promotional content of the same exact levels made it seem much less interesting than it really is. Guess you get slow and shitty when you play with a controller instead of running around spazzing out at all your enemies with keyboard and mouse.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Game probably will have some problems with AMD cards like RAGE imho.
I want to check this before any "wallet accidents" but need to download 43.6 GB... Which also tells me game have huge amounts of cutscenes, voice acting and mega textures.

 

[RK47]

43gb for fps? fuck.

 

[Metro]

I did, after I posted that. It runs alright, but not as well as I'd really hope.

I'm extremely surprised to find out that I'm actually having fun. Not all of the time, because there are those wonderful moments when you watch other people do cool stuff, but I'm willing to say nice things about it. The level design is fluid and branching (though not on the level of RtCW), the guns feel great, and the AI doesn't always stand still. It's a fair enough start. It'll probably fuck up sometime, though, once you get those dual wield miniguns or whatever overpowered shit they're promising under the "oldschool" guise.

All the promotional content of the same exact levels made it seem much less interesting than it really is. Guess you get slow and shitty when you play with a controller instead of running around spazzing out at all your enemies with keyboard and mouse.

Looks like someone got their check.

 

[Morgoth]

Might want to lower texture settings to avoid stuttering on below 3GB VRAM cards, according to this: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=378036&page=25

Or perhaps it's just some shitty bug.

 

[Infinitron]

Eurogamer review - 6/10: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-20-wolfenstein-the-new-order-review

I never knew Walter "Bill" Heap. My grandfather, like all my grandparents, died before I was born, so I didn't get to hear any of his war stories first-hand. I'm told that, despite being decorated for his actions in the Second World War, he spoke of arbitrary and unglamorous experiences; of men drowning in harbours miles from the action because gangplanks collapsed beneath them. Things like that. Less Hemingway, more Vonnegut.

Wolfenstein: The New Order has moments where it tries to remind you that war's chief consequence is suffering. Among its furious gunfights and science-fiction slaughter, it introduces reflection, romance, sadness and sentimentality. Sometimes it even manages to pull these off, while other times it misses the mark, in much the same way that it is sometimes an exciting and accomplished first-person shooter, yet at other times it falls flat. It's an interesting game and, while I don't think there's a lot to make it stand out, there is quite a lot to say about it.

A favourite topic of alternate history authors is the allies losing the Second World War and Axis forces running rampant across the globe. Much like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, Wolfenstein: The New Order imagines space-faring, atomically assisted Nazis running the planet. The science-fiction side of things is turned up to eleven, with laser weapons, giant robots and genetically enhanced super-soliders all part of an alternate 1960s in which racial purity is paramount and the Beatles must sing in German. As William 'BJ' Blazkowicz, you join forces with what little resistance still lingers, fighting to bring down the New Order and define a future that has more in common with our own.

The game begins as a very showy series of set-pieces, a prologue set toward the end of the war that has you pressing X to close a valve, X to pull a lever, or even X to climb into a plane's nose turret and shoot at Nazi jets. It's all very prescriptive, and although you soon have a gun in your hand and the freedom to run around shooting people, Wolfenstein: The New Order does like its set-pieces and cut-scenes. While the latter are often cheesy, the former throw up a few neat moments, including roping up the wall of a fortress and piloting an awesome giant robot.

There's the option to turn on subtitles for only foreign-language characters. This turns on subtitles for a Scotsman you fight with. Oh dear.

All these scripted events mean that this is mostly a game on rails, taking you from point to point with the minimum of distractions, secrets or alternate routes. Though a few examples of these do exist, they won't keep you off the the path laid before you for very long. Later in the game, a rather obvious Easter egg makes it possible to play some of the original Wolfenstein 3D and the contrast between the two is remarkable. Its ancestor serves as a reminder of just how sprawling first-person shooters used to be, along with how much of their expanse was entirely superfluous, existing only to be explored. In comparison, Wolfenstein: The New Order, like many of its peers, is rigid and claustrophobic.

Things do open up for some of the larger gunfights, with dozens of Nazis dashing around hangar bays, giant underground atria or an expansive submarine bridge, and it's here that Wolfenstein: The New Order is at its best. Bullets whizz, everyone ducks into cover and grenades bounce off nearby walls. Rifles thunder as canny Nazis try to flank you, armoured and augmented soldiers striding forward as you fire round after round into their massive torsos. Your cover is blasted away so you scrabble for protection, you stun robots with deftly hurled Tesla grenades, and you sidestep a charging soldier and use your melee attack to bring him down.

The best of these firefights are in large areas across multiple levels. In one underground rail depot I found myself pinned down in a control room, overlooking the scene. I had some Nazis peppering my walkway from below, other Nazis running up the stairs to close me down and, if I sat in cover for too long, a couple of cheeky Nazis trying to flush me out with grenades. It felt like I was facing a coherent fighting force.

Sometimes things don't hit that sweet rhythm. Things can be quite monochrome and, combined with fogging on some levels, this can make spotting targets difficult. Sometimes you're just firing at muzzle flashes in the hazy middle distance. On higher difficulty levels, enemies inevitably take a lot of damage to bring down, but this just makes your roaring weapons feel weak and underpowered. On lower difficulty levels, you're too much of a bullet sponge and can act almost with impunity.

The balance of lethality isn't quite right, then, and it's not the only thing. The collectibles that litter the game are just a diversion and the potential for character advancement is also quite limited. There are perks that can be unlocked to provide bonuses, such as faster reloads and greater magazine capacity, but these don't make any great difference to anything. The stealth perks can be more useful, but Wolfenstein: The New Order doesn't present many opportunities for sneaking, with the majority of environments clearly not built for it.

The game hands you a cutting tool, which is essential for progress but also useful for cutting into supply stores and metal crates.

More worryingly, the game still lacks technical polish. Sometimes you notice enemies caught on the scenery, which at least can work in your favour - at one point my life was saved when a giant metal hound that was supposed to chase me down got stuck on a corner, endlessly running on the spot - but can also get you stuck from time to time, necessitating a restart. At least it doesn't happen to your AI allies, or in any case didn't happen to mine. Several times I did discover enemy soldiers unwilling to walk through doorways, though, and instead staring at me, guns lowered, in some sort of inert frustration as they remained rooted to the floor. It usually happened in tighter areas, particularly corridors, of which the game has no shortage.

Most of the time things hummed along just fine, but other technical troubles included plot-critical NPCs never appearing, the same cut-scene playing twice, the guards in the Wolfenstein 3D Easter egg firing bullets out of their stomachs, some objects being incredibly fiddly to pick up, and enemy units clipping through closed doors to such a degree that I could easily shoot limbs that extended, like those of a phantom, as they protruded into the room. Wolfenstein: The New Order may not have too much in common with its ancestor in a structural sense, then, but it's certainly evocative of an era when games rarely felt all that rigorously tested.

It's a shame, because although the game is sometimes rough around the edges, you also find many examples of fine craftwork and attention to detail. Machine Games' vision of this alternate reality is all red banners, brushed metal and weird technology. Nazi-occupied London is grim concrete, grey in the evening light. A general's headquarters is adorned with busts and propaganda posters. Everything is appropriately oppressive, though many areas can be a little too tight and cluttered and only occasionally do you really get a sense of size, of grandeur, of the scale of post-war Nazi might. When you do though, it's a powerful effect.

Less impressive are the plot and the characters, which often feel like they exist only to amplify the opportunities for violence and sensationalism. There are grizzled veterans and twisted geniuses and plenty of wicked torturers, but few characters who have a sense of depth. BJ himself whispers corny exposition that is as likely to have you rolling your eyes as it is feeling any empathy with him. To its credit, there are a few plot twists and surprises along the way, none of which I want to spoil, but the game rarely achieves the pathos that it's trying so hard for.

Weapons can be upgraded or replaced as you go along. They get a bit crazy.

Plot aside, Wolfenstein: The New Order would be a gruesome game anyway, with its knives to the neck and its giant robots crushing the skulls of captive prisoners, and there's no denying that it deliberately reaches for so many of the opportunities that telling a tale of Nazism presents. At one point I found myself under a pile of corpses, in a furnace, within a concentration camp. On another occasion I had to suffer a far crueller version of Sophie's Choice as I chose which of my friends would be mutilated by a sadistic Nazi doctor-general. There's a fair amount of watching people die and being helpless. And while there is almost no direct reference to Hitler, Himmler, the Holocaust or to so many examples of the war's inhumanity, their shadow looms large across the game and they're repeatedly reflected in its unfolding.

I wouldn't say it's offensive, but Wolfenstein: The New Order isn't a very tactful game, even though it's often trying to be. The plot, with those many cut-scenes (and with quite a few moments of downtime that turn into fetch-quests), often features abrupt and rather bizarre turns. It might be a sudden sex scene, humour out of nowhere or an unexpected suicide bombing. At one point, halfway through assaulting an enemy base, I had to stop and select a scalpel to make progress. It turned out that my character decided the time was right to halt shooting and cut a serial number out of his arm. This is a game that does everything it needs to to earn an 18 certificate but rarely manages to achieve a sense of either gravity or maturity.

But it is trying, and I do respect that not everyone out there is making games where one minute you're using a laser to make a Nazi burst and the next minute you're collecting toys for a man with a mental disability. This plot, its many cut-scenes and set-pieces, is clearly where much of the game's heart lies. It's had so much invested in it, even if it doesn't quite deliver.

"War is not nice," Barbara Bush supposedly said, and it's often difficult for creative media to get across just how nice war isn't. Wolfenstein: The New Order has all sorts of war stories it wants to share with you and it knows how it wants you to feel, but it's not convincing. Its stories are more sensational than poignant. It's a decent shooter with a good few impressive moments, but it can be buggy and it doesn't offer much you can't find elsewhere, with little to tempt you back when it's over. Where it most tries to stand out, in its narrative and setting, it often comes off as juvenile. Overall, it's built on an impressive world but it doesn't do enough with it, and as a result it's curious, but hardly compelling.

 

[DalekFlay]

All these scripted events mean that this is mostly a game on rails, taking you from point to point with the minimum of distractions, secrets or alternate routes.

 

[Astral Rag]

Welcome to the next-gen™:

 

[Black]

Another blunder for zenimax is another week of pure masturbation for me.

 

[RK47]

It's a solid game.
Like turds are.

 

[1451]

Watching a stream of this, graphics are good, animation of pc is also well made. Ragdoll physics of enemies are bad, guy is shooting them in the head and they fall towards him as if the bullets are hooks pulling enemies.
Sound is also good. AI is total shit, guns feel real too bad there is no multiplayer(on the other hand it could be lame if level design of campaign would be replicated in mp, too linear and all that)

 

[balmorar]

Piece of shit, lol.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Normally I'd assume that this final song is an edited-in joke, but since we don't live in a normal world any more I know it's true.

 

[insukk]

 

[DalekFlay]

Oh video games...

 

[codexian reject]

Ragdoll physics of enemies are bad, guy is shooting them in the head and they fall towards him as if the bullets are hooks pulling enemies.

Body should fall in a direction that enemy is walking/ running at, since it carries a lot more kinetic energy than a bullet, at best the head itself would bounce back a bit. From the vids ragdoll is fine, you're trying too hard. Go back to school.

 

[Astral Rag]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/20/wolfenstein-new-order-pc-problems/

What time is it? It’s WHINY MOANY GRIPEY O’CLOCK, that’s what goddamn time it is. I’d hoped to have made decent inroads into Wolfenstein: The New Sequel* by now, but no PC code was available before release, and post-release the thing’s all but unplayable on my system, even on its lowest settings. I’m not alone in this, but while troubles are reported on a myriad of systems, AMD-ATI graphics card users have been hit particularly hard. I even bought a Radeon R290 yesterday for the express purposes of this and Watch Dogs, but I’m looking at 10-20 FPS most of the time. It does spike to 40 on occasion, but not often or consistently enough to enjoy the experience. Even the Bethesda and Machine Games logos at the start play like a cellphone video from 2004. At least I’m not suffering from the crashes to desktop that many others have reported.

A few possible performance aids are below, but they haven’t helped me

By and large NVIDIA owners are doing a little better, and patches and driver updates are no doubt being feverishly worked on (following a 10GB day-one patch already). Buzz about the game itself from consoleland’s reviews falls mostly into the ‘quite good’ camp (though there are a significant number of dissenting opinions), so this is a bit of a shame. I’ll do my best to verify/frown at that as soon as possible, but right now this is an unhappy mirror of fellow id Tech 5-powered shooter Rage’s PC launch issues. For now I strongly recommend that you hold fire on buying the game until its issues are definitively resolved.

...

 

[Angthoron]

Good to hear that the ATi, having won console bids for both consoles, still can't make drivers worth a shit.

 

[Metro]

I really didn't think the franchise rape could be any bigger than the last game. N-E-ways, looks like Metro 2033/LL are setting the 'standard' for FPS games: 75% scripted/cinematics and 25% mediocre shooter. Doom 4 is going to be a total disaster.

 

[80Maxwell08]

I really didn't think the franchise rape could be any bigger than the last game. N-E-ways, looks like Metro 2033/LL are setting the 'standard' for FPS games: 75% scripted/cinematics and 25% mediocre shooter. Doom 4 is going to be a total disaster.

Considering Doom 4's developmental troubles I would say it's already a disaster. They just need to finish something so zenimax can recoup their money before deciding to give id a hard deadline and they ship something they know won't help them keep their jobs.