Despite all the new and very good games that have come out lately, I've spent most of the last month playing through MachineGames' Wolfenstein releases from 2014 and 2017.
I started playing the first one, Wolfenstein: The New Order, for much the same reason I played through all those Call of Duty games recently. As the AAA games space teeters on the brink of unsustainable oblivion, pushing the boundaries of scale and graphical fidelity well past the point the industry can financially support them, I've been wondering if we can simply...go back. But not just back generally, that's a useless sentiment; I mean back to a specific time when games maybe weren't quite as spectacular as they could be today, but are more than good enough relative to the cost and state of the market.
I found that point in those Call of Duty games, and in Wolfenstein I found it as well. For something that's now a decade old, New Order is great! It's got big, explosive cutscenes; it's got a rollercoaster action movie storyline that jumps from one exotic location to the next; there was genuine care invested in its characters and writing; and the visuals, especially in 4K, more than hold up.
Even its arena-based combat still feels strangely modern. If you've never played it, or just can't remember it (it's been a decade, stuff has happened!), New Order wasn't a game where every corridor was full of bad guys. Instead, most of its gunplay took place in large, specially-designed sandboxes where players were free to kill everyone however they wanted, whether stealthily (which emphasised reaching then silencing officers) or all guns blazing.
Of course in some ways, it still feels like it was made a decade ago--the writing can get a little overwrought at times, in ways I suspect would be polished up nowadays, and manually picking up armour and ammo is a huge drag. But those are criticisms I can't level at its sequel: 2017's The New Colossus took everything people loved about the first game and simply juiced them up. I can't believe how well this game holds up in 2024.
Its new cast are just as loveable, only now the game is genuinely funny as well. It looks so good I can't visually separate this game from many (if any, CoD's cutscenes aside) of its AAA shooter successors over the past seven years. It maintains the same overall shape of its predecessor--spend some time socialising in a hub then venture out to blast Nazis in explosive setpiece stages--but everything is just a little tighter, a little bigger, a little louder.
I feel bad for forgetting how fucking good this game was in every way, down to the most intimate details. Like yes, it's a very fun shooter, in terms of the guns feeling weighty and the bad guys doing interesting things. But this is a game more remarkable for how much love was poured into it. Every corner of this alternate timeline has been fully realised, from ships logs to Nazi posters. This isn't an RPG or a strategy game, it's a shooter that you can blast through in only a few hours, but it feels as fully-realised and thought through as something ten times longer.
Once again, it's not perfect. The manhunt stuff, where you revisit old levels to kill Nazi officers, feels tacked on in the least imaginative way possible, and the game's three powerups are shoehorned in so pointlessly that it doesn't really matter which one you pick. But then, I'm not here looking for perfection. I'm here looking for a game that's close enough.
In the wake of Concord's disastrous excess I’m struck by how, like so many Call of Duty games of a certain vintage, these two Wolfenstein games are fine! We don't need each Nazi to have a slightly more detailed face, or to shoot them in an arena that's got slightly better lighting, using a weapon that has mildly more impressive particle effects.
While I'm a little bummed we never got more games in this series--please note I have not brought up 2019's Youngblood for a reason--I don't want this to read like I'm complaining about the upcoming Indiana Jones game, which MachineGames is also responsible for and which will also prominently feature combat where you fuck up a bunch of fascists. I'm excited for that game!
But Wolfenstein is an example that further supports my growing theory that we can't just say "we want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and we're not kidding". It might help to put some numbers on those sentiments! And if we have to do so for blockbuster shooters, I think we should set them at whatever the budget and headcount for New Colossus was.
