Wolfenstein: The New Order

[Morgoth]

This is the first Wolfenstein game, or id property, I'm actually interested in because it's not being made by id Soft or it's retarded brother Raven.

 

[Don Peste]

Prey 2 will be better than this.

 

[Morgoth]

Only if Obsidian develops it.

 

[dunno lah]

This is the first Wolfenstein game, or id property, I'm actually interested in because it's not being made by id Soft or it's retarded brother Raven.

Weirdest oldfag ever.

 

[Morgoth]

Was listening to Carmack's Quakecon keynote.

Note that idTech 5 had to be so severely crippled down (Texture resolution baked just 1/4th of the intended resolution; lighting model severely curtailed) so that they could make Rage run on those piece of shit console hardware. Optical disk size limit was also a hurting factor.

With Wolfenstein, I expect at least for the PS4/X1/PC version to have higher texture resolution.....which makes me wonder how large that download will be. 50GB maybe?

 

[Morgoth]

Quakecon footage (cam):

 

[potatojohn]

starts with a five minute interactive cutscene

dude plays with a gamepad

gets stuck in the same spot for five minutes as wave after wave of enemies come in

game has nexgen amount of visual effects so you can't see shit

enemies are bullet sponges

weapons seem to have 2-3 modes, and can be dual-wielded

 

[Morgoth]

Oh that little game in the beginning was really excellently dubbed. The grandma is so lovely... fucking annoying grandma-ish and Bubi is an Austrian douchebag. Glad to see they got the voice acting right.

 

[Morgoth]

Aesthetics, animations, mimics and sound look prime Trääääpple A.

Swedes + Carmack engine make a good couple.

 

[Morgoth]

If they're gonna release mod tools for that I'm gonna replace every tin soldier face with Wolfgang Schäuble's one. It would be an instant classic.

 

[mindx2]

starts with a five minute interactive cutscene

dude plays with a gamepad

gets stuck in the same spot for five minutes as wave after wave of enemies come in

game has nexgen amount of visual effects so you can't see shit

enemies are bullet sponges

weapons seem to have 2-3 modes, and can be dual-wielded

Don't forget the most important feature of the modern FPS.... REGENERATING HEALTH!!!

Can't wait to find all those areas the designers put in for me to hide behind while my health goes back up to 100%!!!


Seriously, that looked so similar to Crysis 3 and I really, really disliked that game.

 

[Darth Roxor]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/26/so-i-played-some-wolfenstein-the-new-order/

Huh, the spellcheck on here knows the word ‘Wolfenstein’. Good job, dictionary attendants. Anyway, the reason I’ve had cause to use that peculiar faux-Teutonic title today is that I played an early press build of the latest game in the series, Wolfenstein: The New Order, at Gamescom.

It was a strange experience, not least because it seemed so desperate to remind me that Nazis are evil. Have we forgotten that already?

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a Bethesda-funded reboot of the Man vs Nazis idea first rolled out by Id at the very start of the first-person genre, and it’s being made by Machine Games in Sweden. Fine pedigree there, then, with folks from the Riddick and Darkness games as part of the team responsible for the big push on a game that founded shooters as a concept.

The hands-on at Gamescom was from a level at the start of the game, showing BJ’s journey from his 1940s adventures to the game’s 1960s-with-Third Reich alternate world core. As such I got to see World War II bombers crashing into the side of a castle, before shooting super-Nazis in the not-future. A good range of things to see and shoot, then. I also got to see the game’s cover-mechanic, which is really rather neat: you simply hold a button next to things you want to look over/around/under, and move accordingly. Intelligent stuff, and a fine extra to the usual gamut of first-person control things.

It goes without saying that it looked great, too. Pretty, detailed, explodey. All as you’d expect.

Seeing and shooting was, however, hampered by the decision to demo the PC version of the game with gamepads only. Some mixture of my dislike of gamepad for first-person, the requirement for pinpoint accuracy, and the awfulness of the pad itself led to what should have been a straightforward experience of scripted whack-a-mole being an excruciating exercise in thumbstick twiddling. Oh how I sighed. Oh how I rolled my eyes when I died and watched the difficulty vanish on my second attempt.

I wonder whether the devs stood behind me were aware of my snorts of irritation and annoyance, or whether they simply assumed I was a cack-handed fool. But the truth is I used gamepads every day, and have no issue controlling games with them. This causes me to suspect that the PC version of Wolfenstein perhaps isn’t totally cut out to be shown at its best using a pad, which makes the decision to force the press to use one – this was Germany for goodness sakes, there was no mouse and keyboard shortage here – all the more mystifying.

We should put that aside, shouldn’t we?

The New Order has plenty going for it in the unrealistic dude-shooting department. You can pick up mounted weapons and strut about like The Heavy from TF2, you can regain health simply by eating, and overdoing it just means you have even more (temporary) health, meaning you can take on a shrew-like eating habit, without fear of fat ankles. There are secrets, there are mutant Nazi Franken-bots, there’s dual-wielding, there’s getting knocked across the room by grenades, there are stealth sequences where enemies conveniently never have their back to a wall… all that good stuff.

The problems with it… well, they seem like problems that a lot of games share. It basically looks – from this very brief slice of the game – like a lack of imagination. Now, they are probably holding on to all the imaginative stuff to show off during the mech-thumping 1960s alternate history part of the game that I didn’t get to see much of – and I suppose, if I am honest I DO want to see that stuff, despite my complaints in this article – but what I did see of the game wasn’t doing much to hold my poorly-serviced attention. I mean, sure, I pretty much have a conveyor-belt of videogame distractions aimed directly at the incinerator hatch of my mind, but I don’t usually get the itch to walk away from a game this soon.

One of the things that contributed to that itch was how bluntly nasty the game seems to want to be. I don’t mind things being a bit dark, and there are games which benefit from their grisly moments – the demo I saw of The Witcher 3 the same week reminded me of that – but Wolfenstein just seemed to miss the tricky mark that makes such horrors effective on the player. Neither slapstick pastiche, nor artfully bloody, nor any satisfying grade of guts between. At the dinner party of videogames with nasty subplots, it felt like the teenager who just blurted out something truly disgusting, to the distaste of everyone else, who had tastefully framed their own gore stories with well-worn conceits.

The “big choice” the player has to make in this chapter of The New Order is which of his friends gets his eyes cut out by a vile Nazi doctor-general, and the opening scene of the 1960s was a vignette in which we helplessly watch mentally ill people and their carers being shot in the head by Nazis, before finally being able to act to save BJ. Blood and ugliness seldom turns me off, but this was just clumsy gruesomeness. So blunt. Tactless gore shock value stuff.

I get it: Nazis are bad. I was just looking for some run and gun.

Anyway, as with something else I saw that week, Wolfenstein looked like it had benefited from the rich seam of cash that Bethesda was able to offer its developers. The polish oozed from it. It does not look like it benefited much from interesting design decisions, however. Perhaps that’s something to do with the source material. Perhaps it was simply the quality and quantity of the demo shown at Gamescom. Perhaps there’s much more to come. You should certainly take my opinions with a pinch of anti-pepper.

Move along, folks, nothing to see here

 

[mindx2]

Move along, folks, nothing to see here

Did we really expect anything different*.....






*especially after the disappointments from Blood Dragon and Rise of the Triad!

 

[DalekFlay]

So your highlighted grievances are... it's violent, it's on consoles too like every other game since 2005, it's violent. Not exactly turning me away screaming.

If it plays like Riddick then I want to play it, period.

 

[sexbad?]

I'd like some glorified, tactless violence.

 

[DeepOcean]

The only thing that got me slightly worried was the bullet sponge enemies comment. God, I hate that stuff.

 

[Metro]

 

[Darth Roxor]

So your highlighted grievances are... it's violent, it's on consoles too like every other game since 2005, it's violent. Not exactly turning me away screaming.

My highlighted grievances are a shit first person cover system that makes my nightmares of Call of Juarez 2 return, retarded typical fps "stealth" levels, "scripted whackamole" shooting parts, and horribly stupid grimdarkness "OMG EVIL NAZIS!!!! IMMA PLUCK OUT UR EYES" that shows they've missed the point by a fucking mile and have no idea what Wolfenstein was always about in all its iterations.

 

[DalekFlay]

retarded typical fps "stealth" levels,

Have you played Riddick? It's a fucking awesome game, and more of that is what you should expect from this if it pans out well.

shows they've missed the point by a fucking mile and have no idea what Wolfenstein was always about in all its iterations.

You'd think by 2013 people would learn than having a 20 year old branding on the cover does not mean the game will play like a 20 year old game. I couldn't care less if this lives up to whatever pedigree you think Wolfenstein has. All I want is for it to be a good game.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Have you played Riddick? It's a fucking awesome game, and more of that is what you should expect from this if it pans out well.

Yes, I have played Riddick. It was a cool game

in 2004

And what else have they done since then? Oh, right, absolutely nothing. And stealth levels where "enemies conveniently never turn their back to a wall" doesn't sound re-assuring at all.

You'd think by 2013 people would learn than having a 20 year old branding on the cover does not mean the game will play like a 20 year old game. I couldn't care less if this lives up to whatever pedigree you think Wolfenstein has. All I want is for it to be a good game.

I like your reasoning. It would go well with the general population on Eidos Montreal official Thiaf forums.

 

[Zewp]

Well, Dalekflay has in the past said he thinks Thiaf will be a good game, even if it's a bad Thief game and that Codex cannot into gradients of enjoyment.

 

[DalekFlay]

I like your reasoning. It would go well with the general population on Eidos Montreal official Thiaf forums.

I like when people like you try and make judging a game on quality rather than the name on the box sound like a crazy idea. The opposite is the crazy path.

Well, Dalekflay has in the past said he thinks Thiaf will be a good game, even if it's a bad Thief game and that Codex cannot into gradients of enjoyment.

No I didn't, don't make shit up. I said Deus Ex: Human Revolution was really good so I would give the Thief team the benefit of the doubt for a while. They ended up ruining that because the game looks like shit and they say endless amounts of stupid shit, as I have pointed out in the Thief thread for months now.

 

[Zewp]

I'm making shit up, ey?

This is one of those times where a game is not living up to its predecessors but can still be fun. Codex cannot into gradient enjoyment, something is either a return to the amazing Metal Age or a piece of shit. I'm not so disabled.

This looks like Dishonored 2 and I will have fun with it. I didn't expect much better, really.

DalekFlay likes a lot of shit games, so I'm not surprised at his opinion.

Thanks for the perfect example of Codex cannot understand gradient enjoyment. There is shit and amazing Thief 2 and nothing in-between.

Date on these posts: June 12. 2 months ago.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I like when people like you try and make judging a game on quality rather than the name on the box sound like a crazy idea. The opposite is the crazy path.

Oooh, that's a good one. Quality.

Show me the quality in "scripted popamole shooter with unnecessary edgy grimdark and forced and painful stealth sections" without resorting to 'b-but... THEY MADE RIDDICK "

 

[DalekFlay]

I'm making shit up, ey?

Date on these posts: June 12. 2 months ago.

I like that you think you caught me in some lie because I said it might be good for what it is. Last couple months the game has sounded worse, and I have said so. We shall see when it comes out, I pre-judge nothing. Going from "could be good, Deus Ex was" to "well could be good for what it is" to "eh sounding kind of rough" is what you call logical reaction progression based on actual information.

A foreign concept to many of you, I know.

Show me the quality in "scripted popamole shooter with unnecessary edgy grimdark and forced and painful stealth sections" without resorting to 'b-but... THEY MADE RIDDICK

I have no idea if the game will be good or not, but on everything but the cover system you're bitching about shit Riddick did, and Riddick was a great game this can hopefully match up to. Or maybe it won't. Who knows? I don't... yet.