In the pantheon of computer games, the Wolfenstein franchise is one of the longest running and most prolific, stretching back almost 30 years to 1981 when it debuted on the Apple II. And it was Wolfenstein 3D which put legendary developer id software on the map in 1992 and revolutionized the first-person shooter genre. But like an aging porn star, Wolfenstein's best years are behind it and recent exposure represents only a fraction of what it was in the beginning.
I first became acquainted with the id Tech 4 engine in November 2002 when a leaked alpha of Doom 3 hit the internet. As the first game to feature entirely dynamic per-pixel lighting, the graphics were astounding for such an early build. Unfortunately, the new technology also made it the Crysis of its day as it chugged on my 3GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM and 128MB GeForce 4 Ti 4400 graphics card. Doom 3 hit store shelves nearly two years later and the id Tech 4 engine was still a sight to behold. Sadly, the game did not live up to the promise of the graphics, and interest quickly waned.
In 2005, Quake 4 arrived and the id Tech 4 engine had been optimized for dual-core processors. One year later, Prey used a modified version of the same engine and in 2007 Quake Wars introduced the much-hyped MegaTexture technology. As before, the implementation was impressive but the game play left a lot to be desired.
With a public display of id Tech 5 in 2007, I was somewhat surprised when I read that the new Wolfenstein was being built on the obsolete id Tech 4 engine. However, reports were that the engine had been completely overhauled and that it incorporated such new effects as depth of field, soft shadows, post processing, and Havok physics (in lieu of hardware-based PhysX effects).
I had previously completed the Return to Castle Wolfenstein installment when it came out in 2001 but unlike some other games from that era, it did not make a memorable impression. Despite that, I was still looking forward to the current one, even if the trailers seemed to indicate the id Tech 4 engine was getting a little long in the tooth.
The opening cinematic of Wolfenstein is perhaps the most dazzling part even if the main protagonist looks remarkably like Max Payne. Alas, once the cut scenes are over it's clear that no matter the laundry list of enhancements, the id Tech 4 engine can't compete with today's Unreal 3 engine or Crytek's Cryengine. Some of the World War II aspects make it seem like a Brother's In Arm's: Hells Highway knock-off while the supernatural focus and graphics are highly reminiscent of last year's Legendary.
It's also immediately evident that development priority favored the console design and the PC version is a casualty of this. For instance, there's no Anti-Aliasing and the graphics options are pretty sparse. However, I've regrettably seen worse console ports recently such as Red Faction: Guerrilla.
What Wolfenstein does have going for it is a solid single player campaign with satisfying game play. The constant traversing of the three main city maps get a bit tedious (and confusing) at times but fortunately Wolfenstein features a map compass that keeps you pointed in the right direction if you wander off course. Adding to the overall enjoyment are weapons that can be upgraded with such things as more ammunition, better accuracy, silencer and my personal favorite-- a sniper scope. Also amusing are various enemy traps throughout the game. In one mission, it's possible to turn on a huge fan that sucks nearby Nazis into its spinning blades. And yet another enables the player to gleefully disengage a hydraulic lift, dropping a 22-ton Panzer tank on unsuspecting troops. Grenades and explosive barrels are also quite effective at thinning out the Third Reich but the enemy AI remains spotty. Sometimes, they'll flee the grenades but other times remain more motionless than mannequins.
There's also some mystic mumbo-jumbo about black suns and crystals but I deliberately didn't pay too much attention to it. Suffice it to say, as the game progresses you're empowered with several abilities that let you see through walls, slow time, and shoot through enemy shields. Conversely, Hitler's henchmen also possess similar powers so they keep getting meaner and uglier-- first a big slug and then a giant spider. The finale was lamentably anti-climatic and felt rushed, as if the developers were hurrying to wrap things up. However, a neat statistics tab kept a running total of such things as the body count and time played. When I finished Wolfenstein, the total time was a relatively short ten hours and I'd found 63% of the Nazi intelligence reports, 44% of the gold, and just 9% of the tomes. Total kills numbered 1,470 and that was joyfully broken down into such grisly subcategories as Dismembered (141), Burned (108), Dissolved (28) and Electrocuted (2). Furthermore, 797 breakable items were destroyed and the most used weapon was the MP43.
The only truly unpleasant thing about Wolfenstein is the nagging feeling that it could have been so much better. The low-tech engine makes it feel more like a budget offering than the Triple-A title it should have been. There's also been some internet scuttlebutt surrounding the design and reception of the game. It goes without saying that deciding to build Wolfenstein on a five year-old game engine instead of developing it alongside Rage on the id Tech 5 platform was financially motivated. Sure, it might have added another 12 months to the development cycle but it would have taken Wolfenstein to the next level. Instead, there was a conscious decision to cut corners on the budget and it seems that spilled over into the advertising as well. There was virtually no effort made to promote it and even on launch day there was little to no publicity. Some insiders speculate that Wolfenstein, which was published by Activision, was abandoned after id sold out to ZeniMax in June because ZeniMax and Activision are direct competitors. Interestingly, an anonymous source orchestrated some free exposure for Wolfenstein via a leaked multiplayer beta just a couple weeks before its release. Public conjecture is that it may have come from someone at Endrant, the studio responsible for developing the multiplayer portion of the game. And while it was probably well-intentioned, it conceivably did more harm than good by showcasing what a mess the multiplayer maps were and how outdated the graphics were. If Wolfenstein were a movie, it would have declined early screenings in hopes of a big opening payday before poor reviews had time to spread. Instead, the multiplayer leak fueled negative forum chatter and further damaged the game's chance at success.
Endeavoring to bolster flagging sales, Raven Software Designer Manveer Heir offered to personally reimburse anyone who purchased Wolfenstein in August provided it outsold Madden NFL 10. To no one's surprise, Madden absolutely crushed Wolfenstein by selling nearly twenty-times as many copies (1.9 million to 106 thousand). When Wolfenstein failed to reach internal sales goals, an estimated 35-40 employees at Raven were given their walking papers and an undisclosed amount at Endrant met a similar fate.
However, hoping to spur new customers is an official single-player demo uploaded at the end of October to FilePlanet and a version 1.1 patch said to fix a host of problems, none of which I thankfully encountered.
Personally, I would have delayed development and built Wolfenstein on a cutting-edge game engine rather than pushing it out the door on an outdated platform. Hard-core gamers are a notoriously fickle bunch and they don't spend $400 on a new video card so it can double as a case heater. They want a game that will take advantage of that technology and spit it out on screen. But sometimes game companies are run as poorly as car companies and the end result is that the consumer is the loser. Here's hoping that Rage and Doom 4 don't tread down the same dead-end road as Wolfenstein.
I first became acquainted with the id Tech 4 engine in November 2002 when a leaked alpha of Doom 3 hit the internet. As the first game to feature entirely dynamic per-pixel lighting, the graphics were astounding for such an early build. Unfortunately, the new technology also made it the Crysis of its day as it chugged on my 3GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM and 128MB GeForce 4 Ti 4400 graphics card. Doom 3 hit store shelves nearly two years later and the id Tech 4 engine was still a sight to behold. Sadly, the game did not live up to the promise of the graphics, and interest quickly waned.
In 2005, Quake 4 arrived and the id Tech 4 engine had been optimized for dual-core processors. One year later, Prey used a modified version of the same engine and in 2007 Quake Wars introduced the much-hyped MegaTexture technology. As before, the implementation was impressive but the game play left a lot to be desired.
With a public display of id Tech 5 in 2007, I was somewhat surprised when I read that the new Wolfenstein was being built on the obsolete id Tech 4 engine. However, reports were that the engine had been completely overhauled and that it incorporated such new effects as depth of field, soft shadows, post processing, and Havok physics (in lieu of hardware-based PhysX effects).
I had previously completed the Return to Castle Wolfenstein installment when it came out in 2001 but unlike some other games from that era, it did not make a memorable impression. Despite that, I was still looking forward to the current one, even if the trailers seemed to indicate the id Tech 4 engine was getting a little long in the tooth.
The opening cinematic of Wolfenstein is perhaps the most dazzling part even if the main protagonist looks remarkably like Max Payne. Alas, once the cut scenes are over it's clear that no matter the laundry list of enhancements, the id Tech 4 engine can't compete with today's Unreal 3 engine or Crytek's Cryengine. Some of the World War II aspects make it seem like a Brother's In Arm's: Hells Highway knock-off while the supernatural focus and graphics are highly reminiscent of last year's Legendary.
It's also immediately evident that development priority favored the console design and the PC version is a casualty of this. For instance, there's no Anti-Aliasing and the graphics options are pretty sparse. However, I've regrettably seen worse console ports recently such as Red Faction: Guerrilla.
What Wolfenstein does have going for it is a solid single player campaign with satisfying game play. The constant traversing of the three main city maps get a bit tedious (and confusing) at times but fortunately Wolfenstein features a map compass that keeps you pointed in the right direction if you wander off course. Adding to the overall enjoyment are weapons that can be upgraded with such things as more ammunition, better accuracy, silencer and my personal favorite-- a sniper scope. Also amusing are various enemy traps throughout the game. In one mission, it's possible to turn on a huge fan that sucks nearby Nazis into its spinning blades. And yet another enables the player to gleefully disengage a hydraulic lift, dropping a 22-ton Panzer tank on unsuspecting troops. Grenades and explosive barrels are also quite effective at thinning out the Third Reich but the enemy AI remains spotty. Sometimes, they'll flee the grenades but other times remain more motionless than mannequins.
There's also some mystic mumbo-jumbo about black suns and crystals but I deliberately didn't pay too much attention to it. Suffice it to say, as the game progresses you're empowered with several abilities that let you see through walls, slow time, and shoot through enemy shields. Conversely, Hitler's henchmen also possess similar powers so they keep getting meaner and uglier-- first a big slug and then a giant spider. The finale was lamentably anti-climatic and felt rushed, as if the developers were hurrying to wrap things up. However, a neat statistics tab kept a running total of such things as the body count and time played. When I finished Wolfenstein, the total time was a relatively short ten hours and I'd found 63% of the Nazi intelligence reports, 44% of the gold, and just 9% of the tomes. Total kills numbered 1,470 and that was joyfully broken down into such grisly subcategories as Dismembered (141), Burned (108), Dissolved (28) and Electrocuted (2). Furthermore, 797 breakable items were destroyed and the most used weapon was the MP43.
The only truly unpleasant thing about Wolfenstein is the nagging feeling that it could have been so much better. The low-tech engine makes it feel more like a budget offering than the Triple-A title it should have been. There's also been some internet scuttlebutt surrounding the design and reception of the game. It goes without saying that deciding to build Wolfenstein on a five year-old game engine instead of developing it alongside Rage on the id Tech 5 platform was financially motivated. Sure, it might have added another 12 months to the development cycle but it would have taken Wolfenstein to the next level. Instead, there was a conscious decision to cut corners on the budget and it seems that spilled over into the advertising as well. There was virtually no effort made to promote it and even on launch day there was little to no publicity. Some insiders speculate that Wolfenstein, which was published by Activision, was abandoned after id sold out to ZeniMax in June because ZeniMax and Activision are direct competitors. Interestingly, an anonymous source orchestrated some free exposure for Wolfenstein via a leaked multiplayer beta just a couple weeks before its release. Public conjecture is that it may have come from someone at Endrant, the studio responsible for developing the multiplayer portion of the game. And while it was probably well-intentioned, it conceivably did more harm than good by showcasing what a mess the multiplayer maps were and how outdated the graphics were. If Wolfenstein were a movie, it would have declined early screenings in hopes of a big opening payday before poor reviews had time to spread. Instead, the multiplayer leak fueled negative forum chatter and further damaged the game's chance at success.
Endeavoring to bolster flagging sales, Raven Software Designer Manveer Heir offered to personally reimburse anyone who purchased Wolfenstein in August provided it outsold Madden NFL 10. To no one's surprise, Madden absolutely crushed Wolfenstein by selling nearly twenty-times as many copies (1.9 million to 106 thousand). When Wolfenstein failed to reach internal sales goals, an estimated 35-40 employees at Raven were given their walking papers and an undisclosed amount at Endrant met a similar fate.
However, hoping to spur new customers is an official single-player demo uploaded at the end of October to FilePlanet and a version 1.1 patch said to fix a host of problems, none of which I thankfully encountered.
Personally, I would have delayed development and built Wolfenstein on a cutting-edge game engine rather than pushing it out the door on an outdated platform. Hard-core gamers are a notoriously fickle bunch and they don't spend $400 on a new video card so it can double as a case heater. They want a game that will take advantage of that technology and spit it out on screen. But sometimes game companies are run as poorly as car companies and the end result is that the consumer is the loser. Here's hoping that Rage and Doom 4 don't tread down the same dead-end road as Wolfenstein.
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