Wolfenstein: The New Order

• 1. Introduction

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  Wolfenstein: The New Order is a 2014 first-person shooter made by the studio MachineGames, and it first reached the public as three still images with one caption: 1960. Nothing else was explained. The number gave no hint of the story, which unfolds in an alternate Europe where the Nazis won the Second World War. The game raises questions that this documentary will follow. What happens to a soldier who loses fourteen years to a single injury? How do designers turn a character who was only ever the man you steered into someone a player can care about? And why would a publisher invent an entire fake record label to sell a shooter?

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• 2. Waking Into 1960

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  In July 1946, with the Allies close to defeat in Europe, a huge aerial raid struck a fortress and weapons laboratory run by the SS officer Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse. Among the paratroopers was William "B.J." Blazkowicz, an American soldier and the hero of the series. He is captured inside the human experimentation laboratory. He escapes through its emergency incinerator, but the escape leaves him severely injured and unresponsive.

  He ends up in a psychiatric asylum in Poland, where he lies in a catatonic state. The head nurse is Anya Oliwa, who runs the place with her parents under Nazi rule. Blazkowicz watches as the family is regularly forced to hand patients to the authorities. The Nazis label these patients Untermenschen because of their mental disabilities and send them to Deathshead for experiments that nobody explains.

  The silence ends when a Nazi death squad arrives with orders to shut the asylum down. Anya's parents resist and are executed. Blazkowicz wakes, kills the squad and flees with Anya to her grandparents' farm. There he gives his name, and the family tells him the date. It is 1960. The Nazis defeated and occupied the United States in 1948, and an anti-Nazi Resistance that fought back has been almost entirely captured or killed.

  A captured officer from the asylum, under interrogation, reveals that the Resistance leaders are held in Eisenwald Prison in Berlin. Anya's grandparents smuggle the pair through a checkpoint in Stettin. On the train to Berlin, Blazkowicz meets a Nazi commandant named Frau Engel for the first time. In Berlin, Anya helps him break into Eisenwald, where he frees the comrade he spared fourteen years earlier. Over the course of the story, he and Anya also begin a romantic relationship.

  Inside the prison he learns who leads the Resistance. She is Caroline Becker, head of the Kreisau Circle, and she was left paralyzed by an incident at Isenstadt in the 2009 game Wolfenstein.

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• 3. Borrowed Technology

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  A Resistance strike on a Nazi research facility in London ends with the operations base bombed, secret documents stolen and prototype stealth helicopters in Resistance hands. The documents explain how Germany won. The Nazis built their arsenal by reverse-engineering the work of the Da'at Yichud, a Jewish mystical secret society. Its inventions included energy weapons, computer artificial intelligence and a material called super concrete. The papers also reveal a flaw. Someone has tampered with the super concrete formula, leaving it open to deterioration from mold.

  The Resistance connects the tampering with Set Roth, a Da'at Yichud member held at Camp Belica. The camp is an extermination site in northern Croatia, commanded by Frau Engel. Blazkowicz goes undercover inside it. Set tells him the Nazis have taken Da'at Yichud technology to mass-produce robots and to control them. He offers the Resistance his help in return for the camp's destruction. A Namibian prisoner named Bombate assists Blazkowicz. Together Blazkowicz and Set take the battery for the device that commands the camp's robots. They use it to incapacitate Engel, destroy the camp and free its prisoners.

  Set then explains the root of German power. The Nazis found one of the society's caches, which held technology centuries ahead of its time. He agrees to reveal the location of another cache, but reaching it demands a U-boat. The Resistance hijacks the flagship Eva's Hammer and finds a nuclear cannon aboard. The weapon needs keycodes from the Nazi lunar research facility.

  The Spindly Torque, a Da'at Yichud sphere that can destroy super concrete, is Blazkowicz's tool for getting them. With it he steals the identity of a Nazi lunar scientist and infiltrates the Lunar Base. He leaves with the keycodes. Back on Earth, he finds that Engel has assaulted the Resistance base, killed several members and captured the survivors on behalf of Deathshead.

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• 4. Hero and Villain

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  Bethesda's Pete Hines, the company's Vice President of PR and Marketing, put the old problem bluntly: "He's just the guy that you play." When MachineGames studied the earlier games, it realised that Blazkowicz had never really developed. The team decided his story was worth exploring. In The New Order he shares short monologues, and many show that his experiences have left him traumatized. Creative director Jens Matthies said the team loved "a prototypical action hero exterior juxtaposed with a rich and vulnerable interior psychology".

  The team had mostly made games about antiheroes, but id Software wanted something different. "It's really important to id that BJ is a hero, and not an anti-hero," Matthies said. He argued that players struggle to relate to video game protagonists. The aim was a hero "so relatable that you become them", and the prologue choice was the tool for building that bond.

  In that prologue, Deathshead forces Blazkowicz to decide the fate of a comrade. The player's answer splits the story into two timelines. Either the Scottish pilot Fergus Reid or the American private Probst Wyatt III survives, and some characters and small plot points are swapped for others in each version. Matthies saw Fergus as a father figure who "only gives negative reinforcement". Gideon Emery, who voiced the role, called him "a tough as nails soldier". Wyatt, whom Blazkowicz must protect and mentor, was a "sort of son surrogate" who offers "positive reinforcement".

  The supporting cast got similar care. Matthies described the goal as an ensemble of "genuinely interesting characters we wanted to interact with". Max Hass is a seemingly brain-damaged Resistance member looked after by the former Nazi Klaus Kreutz. He drew on Garp from John Irving's novel The World According to Garp. Matthies called Max the hardest role to cast, saying "it took a tremendous actor to pull that off and a long time to find him".

  Deathshead had already appeared as an antagonist in Return to Castle Wolfenstein in 2001 and as the main antagonist of the 2009 Wolfenstein. For this game the team wanted closure for him. They gave him an enthusiastic personality and a fresh appreciation of life after his near-death experience in the previous game. Matthies said the team "didn't want to cartoon-ify" the Nazis and treated them seriously instead.

  That closure arrives at the end. The Resistance uses the Spindly Torque to breach Deathshead's fortress and liberate his captives. At the top of the tower, in Deathshead's workshop, Blazkowicz learns that the doctor kept the preserved brain of the soldier he chose to let die. Deathshead uses it to power a robot. Blazkowicz defeats the machine and destroys the brain, putting his friend to rest.

  Deathshead then climbs into a larger mecha, and Blazkowicz wins that fight too. He drags the villain from the wreckage and attacks him. Deathshead arms a grenade, killing himself and gravely wounding Blazkowicz. Crawling to a window, Blazkowicz mentally recites "The New Colossus" as he watches Resistance survivors board a helicopter. Believing them safe, he gives the order to fire the nuclear cannon. After the credits, the sound of a helicopter approaching can be heard.

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• 5. Combat and Cover

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  Health in The New Order is cut into separate sections, and each section regenerates on its own. Lose one completely and the player must find a health pack to restore it. The design blends action-adventure with shooting, pairing narrative-driven exploration and puzzle solving with the series' firefights. The story is arranged in chapters that the player completes in order.

  A knife or fist can take enemies down silently, which avoids detection. The alternative is direct combat, which often turns into an intense firefight. Players can also use firearms and explosives, and they run, jump and occasionally swim to cross the locations. A cover system lets them lean around, over and under obstacles, an advantage in both shootouts and stealth sections.

  Weapons are plentiful. Players find them on the ground, take them from dead enemies, or pull stationary ones off their mounts and carry them. Ammunition has to be gathered by hand. The inventory has no limit on how many weapons can be held. Many weapons can be dual wielded, which doubles the damage dealt. Upgrades go further: a rocket launcher can be attached to the side of an assault rifle, and a wire cutting tool can be converted into a laser gun.

  Senior gameplay designer Andreas Öjerfors said the earlier games were defined by "super intense immersive combat", so the team made sure to keep it. The developers call the result a "first-person action adventure". Öjerfors summed up the central idea as "the David vs Goliath theme", with "B.J. against a global empire of Nazis".

  The game has no online multiplayer mode. Öjerfors described the decision as simple: pouring all the studio's energy into the single-player campaign would give it the resources to make something "very, very cool". Executive producer Jerk Gustafsson put it more plainly, saying MachineGames is "a single-player studio".

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• 6. Pitch to Launch

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  In June 2009, ZeniMax Media bought id Software and everything it owned, including Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein. ZeniMax also owned MachineGames, whose staff had been brainstorming ideas and pitching them to publishers. Bethesda Softworks had turned down one of those pitches. It now suggested that the studio build a game from one of the newly acquired franchises. MachineGames asked about Wolfenstein, visited id, and won its approval. By November 2010 the paperwork was signed, and preliminary development lasted roughly three years.

  On the 7th of May 2013, Bethesda formally acknowledged the game with an announcement trailer. A launch first planned for late 2013 slipped into 2014 so the developers could polish the game further. In February 2014 the schedule was set at the 20th of May in North America, the 22nd of May in Australia and the 23rd of May in Europe. The Australian and European dates were later moved forward, giving a worldwide launch on the 20th of May 2014.

  The New Order was the second game built on id Software's id Tech 5 engine, after Rage in 2011. The team often struggled to reach 1080p at 60 frames per second in complex environments, but Matthies said, "we always made it work somehow". He named speed and detail as the engine's strengths and dynamic lighting as its weakness. The static lighting won his praise, since it allowed full radiosity.

  Senior concept artist Axel Torvenius said the art drew mainly on films from the 1960s, and he pointed to the James Bond movies. The Nazi designs borrowed from how the Nazis looked at the end of the Second World War. Öjerfors said that look was "blended with the style of the 1960s" and its fashion. Exaggeration ran through the whole design, from what Öjerfors called "the larger than life leaders" to the "strange technology, strange experiments". The alternate history also freed the team on scale. "I never really felt that we were limited," Öjerfors said. Character models can carry textures up to 256k, though this is rarely used because the detail is hard to see from a distance.

  Every pre-order came with an access code for the beta of Doom, which id Software was developing.

  In Germany, section 86a of the Strafgesetzbuch forced the release to remove all Nazi symbols and references. The country's ratings board, the Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle, later introduced a "social adequacy clause" that allows such imagery in relevant scenarios, judged case by case. On the 22nd of November 2019, Bethesda began selling the uncensored international version in Germany. That version has no German language option, and the censored, localised edition stayed on sale separately.

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• 7. Sound of 1960

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  Composer Mick Gordon travelled to Sweden to meet the team and spent three days going through the game with them, partly working with Fredrik Thordendal and Richard Devine. He said most projects hand a composer "a list of 150 battle cues to do", and this one was different. The team treated the music as a priority, and together the musicians composed more than six hours of score.

  The search for a sound began with Richard Wagner, whose music Adolf Hitler admired. After studying it, the team found it did not fit the game's tone. They settled instead on distortion as the sound of the Nazis. "There's lots of analogue distortion types," Gordon said, from pedals to valves "that are really breaking up". They also borrowed from 1960s music, recording with analogue equipment such as tape machines and reel-to-reel machines. Gordon called the soundtrack "a tribute to all things guitar", and Matthies said much of it uses odd time signatures yet stays "very groovy". Hines described the aim as taking iconic 1960s sounds and adding the studio's own twist.

  The same idea powered the marketing. Bethesda, the agency AKQA and COPILOT Music and Sound invented a fictional state-owned German record label called the Neumond Recording Company. It introduced the alternate history through 1960s pop music. The label promoted ten fictional German pop artists, with seven original songs and three covers reworked into German. Each artist got a full biography, and each single came packaged with album cover artwork.

  The original Neumond songs were first written in English. That kept the lyrics true to the game's alternate history without producing anything that could serve as real propaganda outside it. The three covers appeared in trailers but were left out of the game, because their owners did not want the songs associated with Nazi imagery.

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• 8. Reception and Sequels

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  Metacritic, the review aggregator, rated The New Order "generally favorable". Critics singled out the combat first. Daniel Hindes of GameSpot said its intensity and variety gave the series "a breath of fresh air", and he called the stealth "simple but effective". Ryan Taljonick of GamesRadar called the fighting "satisfying". Simon Miller of VideoGamer.com praised the shooting as "solid", and Steve Boxer of The Guardian called the stealth "decent".

  The story split opinion. Colin Moriarty of IGN said the narrative and characters were where the game "really shines", and Matt Sakuraoka-Gilman of Computer and Video Games found the writing "intelligently written, brilliantly voiced and highly polished". Mike Fahey of Kotaku first found the emotion too obvious, then ended up calling the story "spectacular". Miller, by contrast, called the narrative "awful". Matt Bertz of Game Informer found the added depth for Blazkowicz odd beside his brutal actions elsewhere. Reviewers also disagreed about pacing. Ludwig Kietzmann of Joystiq felt it "dragged down" during ammunition hunts, while Steven O'Donnell of Good Game felt he was "gearing up and patching up" after each fight.

  The alternate history won wide approval. Jason Hill of The Sydney Morning Herald called the concept "absorbing", and Owen Anslow of The Mirror called it "intriguing". Graphics divided critics. Hindes praised how the visuals captured the period, while Liam Martin of Digital Spy said the game was "hardly a shining example of next-gen graphical potential". Many reviewers admitted the game beat their expectations. Jon Blyth of Official Xbox Magazine called it an "unexpected gem", and Tom Watson wrote in New Statesman that it was "the big surprise of the year".

  Sales matched the praise. Within a week of release, the game was the second best-selling title of 2014 in the United Kingdom, behind Titanfall. It topped the weekly UK chart, accounting for a quarter of all games sold and 36% of revenue. By June 2014 it had sold almost 400,000 physical units in Europe, worth over €21 million. In its first week in Japan, the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions together sold over 11,000 units.

  Awards followed. Classic Game Room named it Game of the Year, and Polygon made it a runner-up. USA Today placed it ninth on its list of the best games of 2014, Eurogamer tenth and Ars Technica sixth. It collected Best Shooter nominations from The Game Awards, IGN and others, and storytelling nominations from the Golden Joystick Awards and the SXSW Gaming Awards. The timeline choice itself was a Golden Joystick nominee for Best Gaming Moment.

  The New Order was the sixth main entry in the Wolfenstein series and the first since 2009. A stand-alone expansion, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, followed in May 2015 and is set before the events of the game. At E3 2017, Bethesda announced the sequel, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which was released on the 27th of October 2017.

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