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New patch for Wolfenstein II with graphic improvements

Bethesda has announced on Steam the release of a new patch for the game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus dedicated to the latest nvidia Geforce RTX graphic cards on PC in order to implement their adaptive shading system, thus greatly improving the performance of the game on this hardware:

A new patch has been deployed to implement NVIDIA Adaptive Shading, improving the performance of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. We’ve been working with NVIDIA to make sure the game runs great on NVIDIA RTX hardware. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus debuts the first implementation of NAS.

Additional patch notes:
* Added support for NVIDIA Adaptive Shading on NVIDIA RTX series GPUs. (Improves frame rate by dynamically adjusting the shading resolution in different areas of the screen, without affecting fidelity).
* Ensured that, on multiple GPU systems, the discrete GPU is preferred over an integrated GPU.
* Players can now choose to ignore/suppress warnings when the selected video settings exceed the amount of dedicated VRAM available on the GPU
* Fixes for skinning issues on GTX 970

For more information, check out the below info from NVIDIA:

GeForce RTX graphics cards support several new, innovative advanced shading techniques, that enable developers to further improve performance, and do things that were previously impossible. One of these techniques is NVIDIA Adaptive Shading (NAS), formerly known as Content Adaptive Shading (CAS). This adjusts the rate at which portions of the screen are shaded, meaning the GPU has less work to do, boosting performance. Factors like spatial and temporal color coherence are measured each frame, and in areas where detail remains unchanged from frame to frame, such as sky boxes and walls, the shading rate can be lowered in successive frames.

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Bethesda marketing VP confirms Wolfenstein III development

Pete Hines – Bethesda’s vice president of PR and marketing – has confirmed in an interview to Metro GameCentral that MachineGames will work on the development of Wolfenstein III after the release of the upcoming Wolfenstein: Youngblood.

He also said that Wolfenstein II : The New Colossus got very good sales numbers, but they could have been better if the game had been released at a different time. However, they’re very happy of that game, and want to continue working on this series.

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Wolfenstein 3-D tournament at QuakeCon 2018

Shacknews has organized at the QuakeCon 2018 a tournament called “The Great Quakeholio Tournament”, where many players fight against each other on Doom and Quake games in different rounds, in order to win various prizes. And in round 4, they had to fight in another game: Wolfenstein 3-D! But as there is no multiplayer part in this game, they had to get the highest score possible in a set period of time, in the same levels.

Finally, the winner of the tournament was Lord_Reven, who didn’t succeed to defeat the boss of ShackNews in a final deathmatch on Quake.

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Wolfenstein 3-D in VR

The indie developer Further Beyond Studios has released a recreation of the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3-D with a new engine, in order to be available for VR headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

The game can be controlled with the Oculus Touch devices, but beware of the motion sickness effect, as there is no teleport, and you move thanks to the stick of the Touch. This is a very interesting project, but also one of my worst motion sickness experience with my Oculus Rift.

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German stance on Nazi iconography in games softens

Germany has always been very severe against anything related to nazi iconography in video games. So the developers of the Wolfenstein games had to release some special versions of their games where the nazi symbols were replaced by some neutral symbols, and any reference to Hitler removed.

These rules didn’t apply to movies, where the rules were far less strict than for video games. But the German games regulation organization (USK) has announced that video games will now be authorized to represent such symbols after an analysis of each game, and how these symbols are used – for some artistic purposes like Wolfenstein.

You can read more details about this on MCV, or on this blog post of the German game developers association.

Here is a comparison of the regular and censored versions of Wolfenstein: The New Order by Eurogamer:

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Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus released on Nintendo Switch

The game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has been released last Friday on Nintendo Switch handheld console, with a porting done by the Panic Button studio – which also ported Doom on this platform.

The game received very good critics, even on a console with far less performances than high-end PCs and latest HD consoles. The graphics are sometimes blurry and hard to distinguish, but the framerate is quite stable – except during some combat and cutscenes -, and the game good to be played on Switch, even if it’s far better on PC or consoles.

Its score on MetaCritic is 81% – it was 86% on PC, 87% on PS4 and 88% on XBox One. You can read reviews of the game at GameSpot, Nintendo Life, PocketGamer UK, Polygon and Destructoid.

Here is the in-depth technical analysis of the game by Digital Foundry:

And the video test of GameXPlain:

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Wolfenstein 2 design post-mortem

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.

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Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot VR also announced at E3

Bethesda has also announced during the E3 the upcoming release of another new Wolfenstein game called Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot VR.

Bethesda described the game as follows:

The Resistance has upped its tech game in the two decades since the events of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot drops you into the role of a resistance hacker on a mission to tear apart the Nazi forces in Paris using their own machines. Take control of a fire-breathing Panzerhund and more as you fight Nazis in the City of Love in order to aid the French resistance. Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot will be available as a standalone VR game in 2019. Saddle up, Cyberpilot. You’re one of us now.

This game also appeared on Amazon at 20$, with some screenshots and a description:

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot brings virtual reality to the revolution against the Nazis.

Paris. 1980. You’re the best hacker in town. Your mission: aid the French resistance by taking control of powerful Nazi war machines. Ram, gun down, and burn your way through the City of Love, leaving dead Nazis in your wake. Saddle up, Cyberpilot, you’re one of us now.

Amazon Germany even had a video of the game in action, in German:

This description is important, because it would connect this game to the storyline of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, where BJ’s daughters will fight the nazis at the same time. 

Here are some screenshots of the game, coming from Amazon:

 

Update:

Here is finally the trailer in English:

 

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Wolfenstein: Youngblood officially announced!

During its conference at E3, Bethesda officially announced the new standalone game based on Wolfenstein 2, called Wolfenstein: Youngblood, that will be released in 2019.

This game from MachineGames will take place in 1980 in Paris, with the 2 twin daughters of BJ Blazkowicz as heroes of a game that you can play either alone or in coop. As seen in the trailer, the blond one seems to be the melee combat expert, while the brown-haired one seems to be a long-range fighter, and both wear the super suit created by Caroline Becker.