Is anyone else strangely excited for the new Wolfenstein game?

[Architecture]

 

It's nothing we haven't seen before, but the caliber of the writing has me intrigued.

[Sno]

Machine Games is a bunch of ex-Starbreeze leads, and i think The Darkness and the Riddick games are all phenomenal.

So yeah, i'm super excited.

Additionally, while it's more tangential, I also felt that Raven's outings with the series were always quite good, so Wolfenstein as an entity never exactly went away in my view.

[Apelsin]

Well, the article from Edge that compared the game's character development to that of The Last of Us certainly didn't harm my expectations of this game

 

http://www.edge-online.com/features/machinegames-wolfenstein-the-new-order-is-as-surprising-as-it-is-bombastic/

[Architecture]

Ex-Starbreeze was all you needed to say. Escape From Butcher Bay was revelatory.

 

I enjoyed Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but I never played Raven's straight-ahead 2009 shooter. I'm hoping that Green Man Gaming will come through with a 25% coupon.

[Bjorn]

Woah, that comes out in like a month?  Weird. 

 

As for the trailer, the opening 20 seconds of that had me hooked, thinking that this was going to be something really bold and different (like hunting war criminals in Brazil)...and then it wasn't that at all.  That said, the pedigree of the developers is certainly interesting and so won't make me dismiss it out of hand. 

[Sno]

I enjoyed Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but I never played Raven's straight-ahead 2009 shooter. I'm hoping that Green Man Gaming will come through with a 25% coupon.

I thought the 2009 Wolfenstein was pretty great, but it doesn't seem like anybody played it. It was quite similar to Raven's exceptional Singularity, which released the very next year, and which similarly seemed to not meet sales expectations. (Likely leading to Raven's current demoted position of being an asset farm for CoD.)

[Architecture]

For some reason I've confused TimeShift and Singularity in my mind--are they similar?

[Sno]

Not really, no. TimeShift explicitly just gives you awesome time manipulation powers, but the abilities in Singularity tend to work more like BioShock plasmids, with lots of strange and situational effects.

They kind of have the same plot conceit though, but i think Singularity ends up being a little more satisfying while TimeShift doesn't really go anywhere or do anything. (I actually like TimeShift quite a bit, but it's definitely a flawed thing.)

[Roderick]

This is doing such weird things to me. I've been reading Stephen Fry's Making History and just watched the documentary The Fog of War in which former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara talks extremely candidly about US war history and how things could've gone differently. Suffice it to say, at this point I'm willing to believe the Nazis are still coming.

 

(Also: the recent developments in Robot News. Man, this is doing damage to my brain.)

[twmac]

Yeah, I saw that trailer today and I think I am onboard.

 

I have F.3.A.R., Singularity and Wolfenstein all unopened in my backlog.

 

I should probably play one of them.

[Architecture]

The asking price for Singularity is $30 on Steam--no, thank you! But they do have Star Wars: Republic Commando for $10. I remember really enjoying the demo for that game when it came out right before Revenge of the Sith.

[Gamemore]

It sort of makes me half-giddy with excitement and half makes me want to barf my heart out. On the one hand there seems to have gone a surprisingly great amount of thought and effort into creating the alternate history nazi-super-reich and some pretty entertaining cheesy imagery (the referee shooting players on the field) but then we see also extensive scenes of the staff and patients of a mental hospital getting mechanically and unglamourously executed by a Nazi death squad and it seems to clash very much with the pulpier elements. I'm sure that there's some very interesting points to be made using this kind of visual and thematic language, but I'm sort of skeptical if the game is actually going to express that.

(PS: For some reason (maybe because they are more outlandish and fantastical in their nature or maybe because they occur during gameplay bits, so you aren't necessarily forced to watch them play out) the more exploitative elements in the previous Wolfenstein haven't turned me off as much as watching the trailers for this one, so I don't know.)

[Sno]

The Starbreeze games were fairly deft and purposed in how and why they established their very grimly violent tones, so i want to believe that this game won't be as reckessly callous as you feel you're perceiving it to be, but i guess we'll see when it comes out. Don't expect it to pull punches though, those guys don't really have a history of that.

 

The asking price for Singularity is $30 on Steam--no, thank you! But they do have Star Wars: Republic Commando for $10. I remember really enjoying the demo for that game when it came out right before Revenge of the Sith.

Republic Commando is one of the few Star Wars games released during the prequel-era that is really worth playing, it's really quite good.

I seem to recall hearing that the PC version can be a pain in the ass to get running correctly on some setups though, so do your diligence before buying. (I think the issues tended more towards strange bugs popping up during gameplay, and less towards simply getting it running.)

[Stuart]

The only thing I really care about, besides the blatant Tarantino-esque dialogue and narrative (by which I mean, invoking schlock, kitsch premise but with clever dialogue and character development. Tbh, that's not new at all in games, and games have done terribly on that front. See: House/Typing of the Dead: Overkill, Wet, Slaughterhouse remake, any narrative based Suda51 game except Killer 7 and Lollipop Chainsaw, etc.), is that the game's level design is actually good. As primitive the original Wolfenstein is, it's actual level design is extremely interesting and open in a labyrinthian way. Modern games with their shiny graphics and varying degrees of striving to be "grounded" in some way doesn't accommodate Wolfenstein, Quake, and Doom's surreal architecture and level design.

 

All I'm saying in the end is: I really hope their pretty Nazi pulp action grindhouse story doesn't bog down the actual game's level design to just being straight corridors with scripted sequences or pseudo-open single areas to stealth around. The Shadow Warrior remake and the Rise of the Triad remake have brought old school level design and modernized it to a point where they can actually add stories and narrative progression within these arena based arcade shooters, Of course, the narrative stuff sucked balls in both of them, but that didn't hinder the game's old school level design. I just hope I get to play in crazy maze levels in the new Wolfenstein that have enough modern video game visual and architecture plausibility to not make them look abstract. Less scripted sequences and shallow stealth sequences, more branching insane corridors and spaces where I can shoot Nazi's and robots with silly guns. When i hear Wolfenstein, I think shooting things in the face while running around like a maniac, not narrative sequences that try to pass themselves off as being as witty and sharp as Tarantino's films, or any other filmmaker.

 

EDIT: In retrospection, my post sound like old man whining (despite not being old and not actually grown up with old id games.. Blegh, take that as you will I guess.

[kaputt]

Yes, I am. I never played Riddick or Darkness, but this game seems really good. The gameplay seems pretty solid, and while the graphics aren't noteworthy, overall this might be a great surprise this year.

[Sno]

The Darkness and Assault on Dark Athena are both well worth playing.

Assault on Dark Athena is the sequel to the first Riddick game, but it includes an extensively remade and updated version of Escape from Butcher Bay, so it's a pretty damn nice package.

The sequel to The Darkness was not made by Starbreeze and is not as good. (While not terrible, it's a completely different game tonally, lacks the open-ended world, and also lacks the kind of inverted survival-horror thing of you being the horrible thing lurking in the dark.)

Just to round out the Starbreeze talk, Syndicate was also not quite the disaster it was made out to be. There's some solid, frenetic shooting to be had, but you can definitely feel the impact of its troubled development cycle. (The guys who founded Machine Games left during development of Syndicate.)

[Stuart]

I guess no one else cares about labyrinthian level design.

 

*walks away to dark corner* 

[Sno]

Rather than labyrinthine, winding level designs, i'm much more concerned about a shooter having individually broad combat spaces that can allow for a wide range of approaches and tactics. I don't really care if a level winds back on itself a dozen times or is a straight shot from point a to point b, i just want the design of that level to serve the mechanics in interesting ways.

I also didn't really think the the RoTT remake was all that great, i thought its levels were very narrow and filled with bad bits of geometry to constantly get hooked up on as i moved around, so i quit playing after only a couple hours. (So there's your caveat to cling to, if somebody wants to tell me that game opens up at all, i'll give it more time. I did grow up with the kinds of games it emulates though, and it rang false to me in a kind of surprisingly upsetting way.)

Also, shortly after reading your post, i saw this preview and was kind of amused and thought perhaps it might be relevant here. An omnipresent dual-wield mechanic that even extends to dual-wielding knives is definitely a dumb little old-school touch.

I have hard time getting a grasp on what kind of game New Order will actually be, the trailers are definitelly packed full with obviously scripted setpieces, both character-driven and action-driven, but there are also brief glimpses of large wide-open environments, and Starbreeze's FPS history has a clear emphasis on open-ended designs. Wolfenstein: New Order could really end up anywhere on the spectrum, it's kind of fruitless speculation to make for now.

[Architecture]

Yeah,  that US Gamer article is a good read, y'all should definitely check it out. I am going to give this game the benefit of the doubt--they're even pushing the concept of player choice in some of their advance press:

 

 

Alex Navarro of Giant Bomb confirmed that this sequence can play out different, as the video demonstrates choices he did not make.

 

I picked up Syndicate on the cheap but never finished it. I enjoyed the feel of the world--Starbreeze is one of the few developers that really puts an emphasis on proprioception these days--but felt that the shooting felt a bit too sloppy and the level design wasn't all that inspiring. It also lacked the seamless narrative of Riddick, which was one of the most exciting elements of that game, especially for its time.

[Frenetic Pony]

Not at all, like Infamous: Again, it looks like something I'd pick cheap a year+ later when I've got nothing else to play. Which is to say it looks all around solid and possibly fun, but not truly remarkable in any particular way.

[twmac]

The asking price for Singularity is $30 on Steam--no, thank you! But they do have Star Wars: Republic Commando for $10. I remember really enjoying the demo for that game when it came out right before Revenge of the Sith.

 

Yeah it cost me 4 pounds and has sat next to Wolfenstein and F.3.A.R. on my shelf looking at me resentfully.

 

Which reminds me I also have Painkiller: Hell & Damnation to play.

 

I didn't realise this was StarBreeze! That makes it an instabuy for me. I appreciate everything they have made even when it is a little broken (Syndicate).

[Architecture]

It's not Starbreeze, exactly--Machinegames was founded by Starbreeze defectors, however.

[twmac]

Okay, so that has tempered my excitement a little. I showed the video to my house mate and he started freaking out at how it undermined everything sacred to the Wolfenstein franchise, which surprised me a little that a 25 year-old woudl have that much of an attachment to the franchise and all (3?) of its games.

 

I just started playing Wolfenstein on X360 - man that game is a classic example of a B Game.

 

Everything works but nothing stands out above any other game that was released at the same time (nor just prior) but it is still a solid little shooter that had too many delusions that there were going to be people playing the multiplayer forever (see the achievements).

 

Unfortunately the game spat out a dirty disc error when I picked up the third tome and now I am debating as to whether to spend another 3 pounds so that I can carry on playing it or cross it off the list of my backlog and chuck it in the bin. It is good but not 6 pounds worth of good.

[Ben X]

the franchise and all (3?) of its games

 

Depending on which you count as separate games, 8 prior to this one:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_(series)#Chronology

[Sno]

Okay, so that has tempered my excitement a little. I showed the video to my house mate and he started freaking out at how it undermined everything sacred to the Wolfenstein franchise, which surprised me a little that a 25 year-old woudl have that much of an attachment to the franchise and all (3?) of its games.

 

To be clear, Machine Games specifically includes Starbreeze's founders and many of the key people involved with The Darkness and the two Riddick games. Syndicate nearly destroyed Starbreeze, a lot of people left the company during its development, and while it's cool that Starbreeze has managed to find new footing after all that trouble, it seems like Machine Games is where the people who defined what you associate with Starbreeze ended up.

Also, Wolfenstein has already been through a ton of weird reimaginings, i don't see any problem with one more. Consistency was never a strength of Id's franchises.

 

I just started playing Wolfenstein on X360 - man that game is a classic example of a B Game.

 

Everything works but nothing stands out above any other game that was released at the same time (nor just prior) but it is still a solid little shooter that had too many delusions that there were going to be people playing the multiplayer forever (see the achievements).

 

Unfortunately the game spat out a dirty disc error when I picked up the third tome and now I am debating as to whether to spend another 3 pounds so that I can carry on playing it or cross it off the list of my backlog and chuck it in the bin. It is good but not 6 pounds worth of good.

 

That's kind of how i felt about it, Wolfenstein 09 was a very good "B" game. It's really very competent all around, but maybe doesn't manage to leave a lasting impression. I really enjoyed playing it, but the way it was positioned as a product in the top end of the console-focused retail FPS market, it didn't really stand a chance.

Singularity is in a very similar space, but it stands out as more memorable to me because it's both a little more focused and goes a little crazier with the things it tries to do.