Good morning! While we were all sleeping (and Adam was fighting terrible conference wifi), Bethesda’s press conference happen. With came announcements of new games, including Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus [official site]. There’s an 8 minute trailer below, which includes live action sequences, cutscene vignettes and lots and lots of killing Nazis and robots and robot Nazis. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Return To Return To Castle Wolfenstein
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is a standalone expansion and prequel to last year’s alterna-history shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order. It came out earlier this week.
You almost never see BJ Blazkowicz’s eyes this time. Those tired, sad eyes gave last year’s Wolfenstein: The New Order soul. Not a lot of soul in the grand scheme of things, but by the standards of games which are primarily concerned with gunning down hordes of baddies, The New Order was a big old bleeding heart. Standalone expansion/prequel The Old Blood is a perfectly decent man-shooter that’s in all other senses a step back into tradition. Maybe that’s why we don’t really see his eyes this time. They’d be too bright and cheerful. He’d be a maniac rather than a wounded soldier.
The horror of the Nazis is that they didn’t have cyberodogs or moonbases or power armour: everything they did was regular people, plain and simple and awful. Back in the zany comedy world of video game Nazis, though, you can now go on another merry adventure into Naziland with all sorts of new (or old, really) kooky mechaNazis.
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood [official site], a standalone budget-priced prequel to the splendid Wolfenstein: The New Order, is now out. Alec will be telling us Wot He Thinks soonish but for now, hey look, it’s out and I have some moving pictures to show you.
There is stealth. In Wolfenstein: The New Order, which is, as you might have already guessed, a Wolfenstein game. That might strike you as strange, but a) the first games to bear the Wolfenstein name were actually stealth-focused, and b) I dunno, I mean this doesn’t look terrible. Just functional. Stealth is an option, if it’s up your gentle whisper of an alley. Blast-kowiczing your way through all that draws breath, however, looks a lot more fun.
Wolfenstein: The New Order is a curious bird, going by a recent half-hour livestream showing a hearty chunk of the first campaign chapter. Yes, BJ Blazkowicz does stab dogs in the neck in QTEs and stand behind turrets in scripted sequences, like those modern video games wot all the kids like nowadays. He can also eat dog food to regain health and collect maps and treasure, like those old video games wot were proper games and not for babies. Then there’s stuff that’s just plain fancy, like dual-wielding knives and sliding and I think “interesting” is the word I’m feeling around? The game’s interesting. I’m interested in playing it.
We broadly accept space-Nazis and robo-Nazis in video games because they’re so fantastical, but Wolfenstein: The New Order‘s marketing strikes an odd note. Take this new trailer, which mixes Nazi robodogs with a Nazi referee gunning down a player in the 1950 Brazil World Cup. This is comic book villainy, certainly, but it’s a touch tone-deaf to have goofy Nazi atomic robomen while cracking jokes about what else the Nazi regime might have killed people for had it continued. The blurring of real and fictional is a bit off.
Curiously semi-serious plot aside, it is looking awfully pleasant, with chunky great guns, power armour, robodogs, and leaning to shoot around corners (leaning in a mainstream FPS! oh joy!).
Hooray! A smidge of Wolfenstein: The New Order footage has hopped out of Gamescom. The American company’s game by a Swedish developer was shown in Germany and a British website has posted the footage! All it needs are my words around it and you have games journalizmz happening. Jim grumbled about the new Wolfenstein in his Gamescom preview, which is strange because at one point the player gets to dual-wield assault rifles. Now I’ve seen Jim’s bucket list, and all it has on it is “dual-wield assault rifles” written over and over and over, so it’s surprising that this doesn’t seem to be for him. But the footage does seem to play out his worries. Can Creative Director Jens Matthies’ interspersed chit-chat convince us of the game’s worth? Warning: the video has violence and vomit, the ‘double V’ of adult situations.
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