Wolfenstein: The New Order

[Damien_Azreal]

Originally Posted by X-Vector

The only footage we've seen of RotT is multiplayer, aren't you a singleplayer only type of guy?

Yes. And that's part of the reason I'm not interested in the RotT remake. They have put a huge focus on MP, and from their DN3D project... MP was the main focus of it as well.

Most studios/publishers tend to lead with what they think will be the most important or strongest part of a game. And when it's MP... I'm done.
Also, it doesn't help... I'm not a fan of the original RotT. I found it ungodly boring and tedious.
Also doesn't help that they've yet to actually release anything. There's nothing to "go" off of. No history.
As I've said. Several times. In the appropriate thread.

With Wolfenstein, one, I'm a huge fan of the series. And two, I've enjoyed Starbreeze's previous games. A lot. There's an established history with both sides that make it easier for me to get behind this.

[KO Gilligan]

You can't write ROTT off that easy - we'll see what the game is like when we play it.

[Damien_Azreal]

As I said, as someone who didn't like the original... and hasn't liked anything shown of the new one... yes, I can.

[Nihilanth]

Well, that's what I was joking about originally. With RotT you constantly say how much you don't like anything about it, but when someone criticizes Wolf, you say it's not fair because they haven't played it or that some good games look bad on YouTube. Like I said, the way you defend Wolf is a perfect counter to what you say about RotT.

With that said, it's not to argue about those games. I don't care for RotT any more than I do for Wolf. I just found that funny how those comments come together.

[Damien_Azreal]

Well, I'd be willing to accept that as a counter argument if we'd seen as much footage of Wolf as we have of RotT.
A little over a minute of footage as opposed to several 10+ minute long videos of RotT... solid comparison.


And as I said, I like Wolfenstein. So naturally my expectations and feelings there are going to be much different. Always loved Wolf. Always hated RotT. That's a huge difference.

[X-Vector]

Originally Posted by Damien_Azreal

Well, I'd be willing to accept that as a counter argument if we'd seen as much footage of Wolf as we have of RotT.
A little over a minute of footage as opposed to several 10+ minute long videos of RotT... solid comparison.

How many singleplayer videos of RotT have you seen?
There was a Reveal trailer ten months ago, but since then it's all been multiplayer as far as I know.

And as I said, I like Wolfenstein. So naturally my expectations and feelings there are going to be much different.

All the more reason for caution and a critical outlook; if they screw up something you care for, you don't just shrug it off.
What I've seen so far reminds me of Terminator: Salvation - an incredibly bland looking (and sounding) entry that doesn't have one iota of the feel of the original series.

[Damien_Azreal]

And, again... I "NEVER" liked RotT. At all. Why would I have interest in a series I've never liked? Specially when I think the footage looks like a bad UT3 mod.
Why is it such a huge deal that I'm not all excited for the new game? And yes, I saw the reveal trailer. And I think it looks fecking awful.

Originally Posted by X-Vector

if they screw up something you care for, you don't just shrug it off.
What I've seen so far reminds me of Terminator: Salvation - an incredibly bland looking (and sounding) entry that doesn't have one iota of the feel of the original series.

Well that's your own subjective perception of the footage shown. Personally I have no clue as to where Terminator: Salvation fits into any of what I've seen, but then again I don't hold Wolfenstein in as high a regard as Terminator.

For me it goes more along the lines of: "I like Shooters. I like alternate timeline stories. And I like shooting anything to do with Nazis. The end."

Also, enjoying the look and feel of Starbreeze games helps.

And BTW, in my opinion the most recent game in the Wolfenstein franchise was pure and utter sh*t. How did that have an iota of the feel of the original game? (not that I care, though)

[Damien_Azreal]

Originally Posted by hellchicken

And BTW, in my opinion the most recent game in the Wolfenstein franchise was pure and utter sh*t. How did that have an iota of the feel of the original game? (not that I care, though)

While I strongly differ in opinion (Wolfenstein 2009 was awesome) it did get initially viewed with the same form of dislike.
A ton of negative comments and feedback about dull gameplay videos. Bad visuals. "This doesn't fit with RtCW"...

The same negative reaction to it's initial showing. And while some maintained that feeling, and still hate the game. A lot of Wolf fans really grabbed hold once they got the chance to play it.

[X-Vector]

Originally Posted by hellchicken

And BTW, in my opinion the most recent game in the Wolfenstein franchise was pure and utter sh*t. How did that have an iota of the feel of the original game? (not that I care, though)

I've played the demo of Ravensoft's Wolfenstein and watched some walkthrough footage; while it's closer to the games before it in setting alone, I consider it to have, well, dull gameplay and bad visuals.
I'm not a diehard Wolfenstein fan but I liked RtCW, especially because of the atmosphere it managed to create (which I believe is partially captured in the screenshots I posted earlier), so that is my template.
The new Wolfenstein strikes me as incredibly boring with its mindnumbing greyness and its puny sounding MG42 derivative and the dual wielding doesn't inspire confidence either.
As I said before, take away the WWII markings and it looks like you're left with a drab, "gritty", slightly scifi shooter of the Killzone and Resistance ilk.

Personally I have no clue as to where Terminator: Salvation fits into any of what I've seen, but then again I don't hold Wolfenstein in as high a regard as Terminator.

There are two main similarities that struck me.
Firstly, T:S is visually as borderline monochromatic as W: TNO appears to be, with a fetish for grey and brown that renders the experience completely lifeless.
Secondly, at no point during the film did I feel I was watching something more than a Terminator movie in name alone; even the superfluous and fluffy T3 has more heart.
Put simply, Wolfenstein 2009 = Terminator 3, Wolfenstein: The New Order = Terminator: Salvation.

Originally Posted by Damien_Azreal

While I strongly differ in opinion (Wolfenstein 2009 was awesome) it did get initially viewed with the same form of dislike.
A ton of negative comments and feedback about dull gameplay videos. Bad visuals. "This doesn't fit with RtCW"...

The complaints had mostly to do with the supernatural elements in that game, if I remember correctly.
A complaint that is just as silly as the ones about Nazi-killerrobots, IMHO - Nazis as bad guys work pretty much with everything; hell, give me any setting that pins me against Nazis and I'll embrace it, I'd even fight evil Nazi-Sorcerers in a medieval-fantasy setting.

....actually, someone please create that game. Call it something like "King Arthur vs. Adolf Hitler."

Originally Posted by X-Vector

I've played the demo of Ravensoft's Wolfenstein and watched some walkthrough footage; while it's closer to the games before it in setting alone, I consider it to have, well, dull gameplay and bad visuals.
I'm not a diehard Wolfenstein fan but I liked RtCW, especially because of the atmosphere it managed to create (which I believe is partially captured in the screenshots I posted earlier), so that is my template.
The new Wolfenstein strikes me as incredibly boring with its mindnumbing greyness and its puny sounding MG42 derivative and the dual wielding doesn't inspire confidence either.
As I said before, take away the WWII markings and it looks like you're left with a drab, "gritty", slightly scifi shooter of the Killzone and Resistance ilk.

Well, I didn't enjoy either Resistance or Killzone, but at least the latter could have profitted from flat-out calling it's main antagonists "Nazis" (which they were) as opposed to Hellghast or whatever.

As for TNO: sure, the game could end up sucking; even I, while I enjoy the games of Starbreeze, find them lacking in many respects. The one thing they always get right, however, is the combat. And if TNO gets that part right (and doesn't screw up too much in everything else) I guess I'll be happy.

I get the complaints about the visual design, though. It may be limited due to the setting and what Hitler, Speer and the party elite actually envisioned for their Third Reich, but I do hope the game will have more than just military and industrial complexes to roam around and shoot SS-Troopers in.


Also, I'm curious to find out whether or not the developers of TNO are the better or worse talents of what used to be Starbreeze.

There are two main similarities that struck me.
Firstly, T:S is visually as borderline monochromatic as W: TNO appears to be, with a fetish for grey and brown that renders the experience completely lifeless.
Secondly, at no point during the film did I feel I was watching something more than a Terminator movie in name alone; even the superfluous and fluffy T3 has more heart.
Put simply, Wolfenstein 2009 = Terminator 3, Wolfenstein: The New Order = Terminator: Salvation.

Ok, I can get behind that, although I do hope TNO won't turn out a steaming pile of waste like Salvation, which, btw, I believe could have been a good film if it wasn't for the hack director that is McG and the idiots who hired him and the screenwriters.

Seriously, I embraced the premise of the war against the machines in the future setting (heck, I had wanted to see that film since I was a teen and first watched T2), and after making my peace with the fact that T3 was just a big-budget fan-film I would have been fine with an average / passable movie that gave me what I wanted, namely the future war against the machines. Then I found out who was going to direct it and I instantly knew that the film was doomed from the start (although I remember to have been naively hopeful at some point during production - don't know why. Must have been the drugs back then).

Wolfenstein: TNO may end up a steaming pile of shit, sure, but at least there's nothing from what has been shown so far that suggests (at least to me) the same kind of mess of a production that was Transformers Salivation.


Damn, now that I think about it, the Wolfenstein / Terminator analogy works incredibly well. I just hope you're proven wrong with the Salvation / TNO comparison.

[john_doe2]

Originally Posted by Damien_Azreal

Until I see a gameplay presentation that follows a continuous sequences of events that properly shows the flow of an area... I'm not going to make snap judgements just because it doesn't look like Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

IMO, people tend to heavily romanticize the past. If RTCW were released today, people would be saying the same crap that they are already saying about TNO. "Oh look, another boring, bland WW2 shooter. It's too grey/brown. OMG, it has robots. Can't anyone come up with something new?" And yes, in case anyone has forgotten, RTCW did have robots. However, they were more like cyborgs since they were a combination of human and machine.

[Nihilanth]

So true. There were a couple of instances in Poland where... there are two main political fractions, call them X and Y. A member of an X fraction was at one point presented with a 'plan' of fraction Y and asked about an opinion. She went on a total rampage, calling them all sorts of names including how impossible and unreasonable their plan was. After that an interviewer revealed that the plan he presented was actually from her own fraction, X. She was like "oh...".

That's not exactly the same situation but a similiar one. It's true that a lot of what people say about games today is just a self righteous negativity just because those games are here today and not before. If they were released 10 years ago, the reception would have been completely different and vice versa for older games. I'm a big critic of modern tendecies myself, but sometimes it's really interesting when you objectively look at some of those things ignoring all sorts of emotional attachments.

[pjVgt]

Originally Posted by Nihilanth

That's not exactly the same situation but a similiar one. It's true that a lot of what people say about games today is just a self righteous negativity just because those games are here today and not before. If they were released 10 years ago, the reception would have been completely different and vice versa for older games. I'm a big critic of modern tendecies myself, but sometimes it's really interesting when you objectively look at some of those things ignoring all sorts of emotional attachments.

Wow You've never admitted being polish before - suddenly I am not feeling so lonely here anymore.

Just to add my two cents here about modern tendencies in gaming - I think gaming as we know it will slowly end. It becomes obscure and antiquated as pictures moving in a cilinder before they became a full fledged movies. It will just take some time before the big corps will notice. Cloud gaming will eat everything slowly but surely - cheap efficent indie-wannabe products with pay-for-content system will live but the mainstream will be the user generated memetic content of the web. Playing on a computer will be like making fire with sticks - why would You do that instead of making a sonic-the-hedgehog character porn and watching Your e-fame grow?

[Nihilanth]

Yup I am. And I believe I've said it on a couple of occasions.

By the way, here's a E3 Trailer.

[Nihilanth]

Interview + new gameplay

[Nihilanth]

Delayed (what a surprise) to 2014.

[Nihilanth]

The Escapist preview + new screenshots. Again, footage looks rather average quality-wise, but screenshots, holy crap... I wouldn't be surprised if those were not "really" in-game:

[ScrewingUpMyRide]

New gameplay footage:
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/r...-from-quakecon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucVZuXMHX1U

[Nihilanth]

Live demo from QC13

Human characters have improved in a lot of ways compared to RAGE.

[Echo Black]

Originally Posted by Nihilanth

Live demo from QC13

Human characters have improved in a lot of ways compared to RAGE.

The shooting bits look like hot garbage. How less inspired can you get?

Naturally nobody is expecting Wolf to be much more than a traditional shooter but damn

[crunchy superman]

I see it has the standard health regen "feature".

[Damien_Azreal]

Originally Posted by crunchy superman

I see it has the standard health regen "feature".

It regens health up to 25% (same as FEAR did) after that you have to use health packs and pickups.

[crunchy superman]

Well . . . that's a start, I suppose.

[Damien_Azreal]

Personally, health system doesn't mean shit to me. Regen or medkits. It's not the system, it's how the game uses the system it has.
A game with medkits can be awful due to placement and how it's handled. As a game with regen can be broken if it regens too quickly.

To me, it's another case of it's not the system being used, it's how the developer uses it. Far too many just see what system is in place, and instantly assume it's going to be crap just "because".

[crunchy superman]

To me it's just lazy design for lazy gamers, good usage or not.

I like the fact that they use german native speakers for the Nazis instead of that weird "Germlish" that was seen (heard) in the previous games; makes the Nazis seem less goofy and more menacing.

The combat doesn't seem that great, though I do get a slight HL2-vibe from the QC13-gameplay (but maybe that's just me) and I do appreciate the fact that you can carry more than 2 weapons at a time because quite frankly this 2-gun-limit has to stop in SP-FPS-games.

[Damien_Azreal]

The actual spoken German is one thing I'm not big on.
The English with overdone German accents is something that felt "Wolfenstein" to me in RtCW and Wolf 2009.
And with this being a sequel to those... having them speak actual German seemed a bit out of place.

Originally Posted by Damien_Azreal

The actual spoken German is one thing I'm not big on.
The English with overdone German accents is something that felt "Wolfenstein" to me in RtCW and Wolf 2009.

Yeah. That was always terrible. Stupid, goofy, terrible.
Yeah, not so much in RtCW. More so in Wolf 09.

And with this being a sequel to those... having them speak actual German seemed a bit out of place.

I guess I'd find it out of place if ze Germans took over ze world but did not speak ze German in it.

[Damien_Azreal]

Originally Posted by hellchicken

Yeah. That was always terrible. Stupid, goofy, terrible.
Yeah, not so much in RtCW. More so in Wolf 09.

You did get that I thought it was great because it was goofy, right?

[KO Gilligan]

The English with goofy German accents is more politically correct. It's satire like Hogan's Heroes. Actual German dialogue is going to seem odd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93sEBKumfyg
.
.

[Damien_Azreal]

Yeah. And in it's own way, it felt so right in Wolfenstein. It played into the camp of the series.

Originally Posted by Damien_Azreal

You did get that I thought it was great because it was goofy, right?

Sure.

Originally Posted by KO Gilligan

The English with goofy German accents is more politically correct. It's satire like Hogan's Heroes. Actual German dialogue is going to seem odd.

Please explain the political correctness of goofy accents to me, I honestly do not understand this.
I always thought making goofy accents was rather racist (although I won't deny their sheer fun).


For me RtCW and Wolf09 don't have enough heart to pull off camp because we have to identify with a main character that has less charisma than a brick wall.
There's no parody there either. Maybe if there was the 'fake German' from Wolf3D and more overall sillyness, then sure, but I always felt that RtCW and Wolf2009 were taking themselves rather seriously.

[KO Gilligan]

Racist? In this case, the "politically correct" path is not about racism.

What country are you from? The Germans of WWII gathered human beings just like you and me and systematically gathered them in mass from their homes and country, ripped their families apart, then piled them into gas chambers, and then on to mass graves.

Does it confuse you that game makers have to decide if they want the enemy to be shown as the atrocious monsters that they really are in our eyes? It's much more appropriate for this venue to be used for entertainment, portraying the enemy as blundering fools, and disposing them as if they were nothing more than pests. The video game venue is an awkward place to teach history lessons about the motivations and traits of a historical foe.

I suppose if you wanted to be less "racist" you could have a moment with the enemies family, see that he has children who will be losing their father when you shoot him....

It's a paradox we face in making video games - the last decade of Vietnam based FPS games generated much discussion about creating a "realistic" environment, and what to do about enemy dialogue. It's one thing to portray a Caucasian as a blundering fool, but now what do we do about vicious Asian and Middle Eastern enemies when creating new games? Again, it's interactive entertainment and not the place where we are trying to humanize or dehumanize the enemy and teach history.

So when I used the term politically correct, I was just speaking to the devs tendency to not go certain places with their game - it doesn't really speak to racism directly.

[Thief]

Wouldn't you guys rather have foreign-spoken dialogue with subtitles all the time? I suppose if the game is campy (therefore not really trying to be authentic), it could go either way, but yeah, give me foreign-spoken dialogue with subtitles any day. I would also agree that Wolf2009 took itself seriously. The enemy barely had anything to say in that game, though, aside from, "Scared, American?", or "Flank him!" or "He's got a particle cannon!"

Just like movies, I'll never watch a movie with the dub track unless I have no other choice. It pulls you out of the atmosphere the movie is trying to create. Can't hear the emotion, the acting is pretty much thrown out the window unless the actor/actress is a master of facial expressions (even then)...it just feels improper. I do really like movies though, so all that might be more important for me than some.

The German-spoken soldier banter in Velvet Assassin (German developed) is one of the more memorable parts of the game. Made the game feel way more authentic, but it must be said that the game is inspired by a true story. That's not to say the conversations were all serious. You had some where soldiers were saying how french cigarettes hit like torpedoes, others were making fun of their CO, and then you overhear a conversation (in great detail) about how the best way to burn bodies in a ditch is to use water. Some of the conversations went on for 30-60 seconds. Authentic, entertaining, and shocking, and frankly German sounds pretty cool.

[john_doe2]

Man, after seeing some of the latest trailers and previews for TNO, I am really pumped for it. Sounds like the best of everything that is old school.

[Damien_Azreal]

The overly campy English spoken German accent was intentional. Not to be politically correct... or any such crap.
But because it was fun. It added to the underlining camp of the games. Yes, the main drive of the rebooted series is a serious sci-fi tone, but there's a layer of camp to the games as well.
And the crappy German accents only added to it. It was fun because they were bad. It was the point.

It's my only meh on the new Wolf. Having them speak actual German... there are still German's speaking English, but now the accents and tone are more realistic and not so overdone.
The new game looks fecking awesome and I can't wait for May. Wolfenstein is the only way I'd ever want to return to WWII in a video game (other then a new Brothers in Arms game).
I'm beyond sick of war themed shooters at this point.

[ZuljinRaynor]

SPION!!!!!!!i!!

[Echo Black]

PAX 2014 footage

Holy crap, this is looking terrible. Much, much worse than I was expecting, both visually and in terms of how it plays. Seems they couldn't fully avoid the COD disease

It's allegedly PC footage played with a pad, by the way

[Damien_Azreal]

That's not PAX footage. It's footage from MachineGames they streamed online. This thursday they are streaming another 30 minutes.

And, this all reminds me of people talking about Wolf 2009... and I still think Wolf: TNO looks great.