In the Digital Dragons conference in Poland in May, Andreas Öjerfors, senior game designer of Wolfenstein 2 at MachineGames, gave a talk about the challenges they got during the development of the game, and what might be the third installment of their Wolfenstein trilogy, as reported by EuroGamer.
He admitted some mistakes with some elements of the gameplay, like a weak stealth mode where enemies could detect you too easily and quickly, thus breaking this mode and making you fight in gun blazes. It was due to a limited bunch of people who believed in this mode, and who could design it properly. Or having a machinegun like the Sturmgewehr that could become too powerful with upgrades, thus making other weapons less interesting to use. The Laserhund – a robotic dog with last – was also a problem, as it was too fast and very frustrating for players.
The communication about some gameplay elements was also not good, like knowing for the player the weak points of each type of enemy. They know it is very hard to transmit information to the players without giving them the feeling they’re forced to do things.
He also spoke about some errors in the first game, Wolfenstein: The New Order, like the fight against the giant London Monitor, that both the studio and the players didn’t like, as it was really annoying. That’s why they didn’t added such huge bosses in the second game.
And about a possible Wolfenstein 3 – as MachineGames always wanted to do a trilogy with these games -, Öjerfors didn’t talk a lot, except that we might hear stuffs about it in two years, and that he would like to give more freedom to the players, who could be able to choose where they go and what they do. They would like to play with the FPS format – maybe I guess with a more open-world format like the Wolfenstein game of Raven Software attempted to do in 2009. These experiments and this game could definitely become reality in the near future, as he says they have the full support and freedom from Bethesda to do so.
