STACK #156 Oct 2017

GAMES FEATURE

visit stack.com.au

It’s the burning question that prompts many a barroom conversation: counterfactual history.

Here are a few we mulled over in the office.

The French (and

After applying the defibrillator to theWolfenstein franchise with 2014’s The New Order, Swedish studio Machine Games is ready to unleash Wolfenstein II:The New Colossus on us.We spoke with senior game designer Andreas Öjerfors. Interview Paul Jones

Spanish) win at Trafalgar . Horatio

Nelson loses his ‘Touch’ and the British navy is destroyed in a decisive sea battle. Napoleon’s Grand Armée marches

into England and French cricket becomes ‘Australie’s’ national sport. JFK survives Oswald’s bullet . John F. Kennedy pulls the US out of Vietnam, and gets re-elected for a second term. His brother Robert follows him into the Oval Office in '69. Media commentators are denied the opportunity to end every political/social scandal with the word ‘Gate’. America falls to the British : The British Empire expands exponentially. They don’t burn down the White House in 1812 and the North and South don’t clash over cotton and slavery in 1861. And ultimately, the world is spared from the Kardashians. Henry VIII has a boy with his first wife that lives : Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, has a male heir who lives. The Reformation never happens, there would be a lot less deaths around the royal court, and divorce parties wouldn’t become a thing for another 450 years.

of pre-production, together with lead

oppression of the Nazi regime has started to become the new normal. A Nazi occupation is a terrifying concept, but I think it’s even more terrifying imagining a population that has started to accept and internalise their own oppression. What does the Nazi-occupied America setting bring to the game? A distorted mirror to everything that happened there in the 1960s. In our alternate history, the pop culture was corrupted by the Nazis, and the civil rights movement never happened. TV is propaganda, and KKK walk the streets. Can you talk about the core gameplay changes you have introduced in Wolfenstein II ? Many of the bigger changes power our goal of letting players play the game the way they want. You can now dual-wield any combination of weapons, creating combos that work for your play style. All weapons can be upgraded in different ways. You’ll choose between contraptions that allow you to traverse the environment in new ways geared towards different play styles. And every enemy type can be taken out in multiple ways.

What important lessons did you take away from The New Order ? That we were going in the right direction, and that

A n d r e a s Ö j e r f o r s

narrative designer Tommy Tordsson Björk. Then they kept working on the themes, characters and story-arcs in great detail for a long time. During this process they try to weave in aspects of the gameplay systems into the story, so that the world we build is consistent and believable. At the start of every new project the entire studio is asked

there was plenty of room to go further. In The New Colossus we have tried to dial everything up, in intensity and in quality. Did you have complete creative carte blanche with The New Colossus ? Yeah. Bethesda trusts us. If we wrote a Wolfenstein story about a farmer boy on a desert planet that joins a rebellion to fight the evil space Empire, Bethesda would probably let us know we’ve lost the plot. But that hasn’t happened, and they have the wisdom to leave creatives alone to do their work as long as the work is solid. I’m interested in how the story comes together for a game like Wolfenstein II .What’s the process? Do you hold a think tank for the concept and then the writers take over, or do the writers come forward with a collection of ideas and you go with one of those? We have a balance where the story boss has the same clout as the gameplay boss. Creative director Jens Matthies started penning the story on day one

In The New Colossus we tried to dial up everything

to come up with location ideas. So in one sense, in addition to being character driven, the story is also location driven – we want to take the player to great, exciting and surprising places. How does the world look in your alternate version of 1962? In The New Colossus we focus

on an America that has been occupied for so long that the

jbhifi.com.au

OCTOBER 2017

008