T w e n t y S i d e d

Before I start picking at Wolfenstein II, I should point out that I don’t think it’s a terrible gameAside from the PC technology problems I talked about last time, obviously.. A lot of these things might seem trivial or nitpicky. “Hey, if the game is good then who cares?” But this is less about griping about a terrible game and more about chastising a series that seems to be settling into some bad habits. Let me repeat my main points one last time:

1. I think this game doesn’t really deserve to be rated so much higher than its predecessors.
2. We’re now on the third entry in this series, and so a lot of this stuff should have been solved by now.
3. While the story isn’t terrible, it’s also not nearly interesting enough to justify the length of these self-indulgent cutscenes.

So when I mention a problem, it’s not because it’s some unforgivable sin against game design. It’s because I think there are things that could have been better. Please try to keep this in mind while reading this series, because I’m not going to put one of these “I didn’t hate the game” disclaimers around every piece of criticism.

Cool? Cool. Let’s do this.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Wolfenstein II Part 3: Legacy Problems”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Like I said last time, my goal here is to illustrate how this game has a lot of overlooked shortcomings and half-baked gameplay systems that should be fully-baked by the third entry in a series. But before I can argue with the critics, we need to talk about the PC launch. So let’s get that out of the way. Let’s talk about…

Technology

The game launched as a broken mess on the PC. I’ve spent hours reading the forums and I’ve never been able to find a pattern in any of it. There doesn’t seem to be a single unifying problem that caused the crashes, headaches, slowdowns, glitches, and bugs. There were people with low-end hardware that could run the game and people with high-end hardware that couldn’t. The problems impacted both AMD and NVIDIA hardware.

I get it. Developing for the PC is hard. This is doubly true if you’re one of the first AAA games to use the new Vulkan API and you’re still working the bugs out. While I always insist that for $60 the publisher is obligated to perform the due diligence required to make the product usable for the customer, I might be more inclined to give the publisher a bit of slack if they had shown even a sliver of competence after launch.

The timeline went like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Wolfenstein II Part 2: Broken Technology”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This game came out to critical praise. The trailers looked good. Outside of the technology problems on the PC, there’s wasn’t a lot of negative press. But then the game was 50% off just one month after release, which isn’t something you normally see with successful games. Yes, that was a black Friday sale and those are always a little crazy. But even so, I didn’t see any other 1-month old AAA games going on that sort of deep discount. Was this an anomaly, or was the publisher struggling to sell this game?

I have no idea, but after playing through a couple of times I can say there is definitely something off about Wolfenstein II.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Wolfenstein II Part 1: Introduction”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.