Monday, February 23, 2015

Behind the Gun: Quake

I played a lot of computer games in the summer of 1997.  My father had bought us a new computer that February, and I was making my way through a number of games I’d heard of and been interested in previously (but which our old computer couldn’t run).  I pushed myself through Another World (it was still called Out of This World in the U.S. at that time), in what felt at times like a long bout of masochism, and was surprised to find that the game was beatable in about 20 minutes once you knew what you were doing (it was figuring that out which took so godawfully long).  I worked through Legend of Kyrandia, and like most reasonable people, I had to look up a guide for the maze in the caves.  I got my ass handed to me over and over and over again by Spectre VR, but kept coming back for more; I’ve never beaten it, I probably never will, and that has always been joyfully irrelevant to my enjoyment of it.  I got bogged down somewhere in the middle (I like to think it was the middle, anyway) of Prince of Persia: The Shadow and the Flame.  And I played a fair bit of Magic: The Gathering, which had recently been made into a sort of RPG by MicroProse (now more or less defunct, I think).  But more than any of these – probably more than all of them put together – I played Quake

Really, that might not be quite right.  It’s probably more accurate to say that I lived, breathed, ate, slept, and dreamed Quake.

*             *             *

The last first-person shooter I’d been able to really play prior to this had been Wolfenstein 3DDoom was a far-off fantasy that I played mostly at other people’s houses.  We owned the shareware version of it, but never bought the full version because it would only have been torture.  The computer we’d first had, back when Doom was the new hotness, was an HP 386/SX.  It could technically run Doom, but the game played like the slideshow highlights of an epileptic seizure.  The only way to combat this effect was to shrink the screen down to postage-stamp size, at which point you could barely see anything, so what was the point?

I still forced myself through Doom, though, because I was too young to have a job, and therefore too young to buy games on my own.  When you rely on parents and relatives to buy you games for your birthdays and Christmases (also possibly on special occasions after many carefully constructed appeals that invariably culminate in pleading), you learn to eke whatever enjoyment out of them that you can.

During that summer of 1997, though, a friend loaned me a binder of what must have been at least a couple of years’ worth of demo discs that came packed in with copies of PC Gamer.  On one of those discs was the shareware edition of Quake.  I no longer recall for sure, but Quake may have been the main reason I asked to borrow that binder in the first place.

I couldn’t run Quake at its maximum resolution, because this was 1997, and you had to be a very special kind of computer geek to have a machine capable of that back then, but it ran just fine at normal resolutions.  I spent a lot of afternoons, evenings, and nights (and, this being summer, the small hours of God alone knows how many mornings) glued to the computer chair, eyes fixed on the screen.  To this day, I can play the first few levels of Episode One from memory.

My familiarity with Quake has gotten to a point where I may go months, or even a year or more, without feeling the need or desire to play it.  In this, it shares a spot with Halo (which came much later in my life), in that I played it first for the novelty, and later, when it stopped being new and started becoming familiar, came to seek it out precisely for the comfort of that familiarity.  It’s a sort of mental comfort food, a thing to consume when I don’t know what else I want, or when I’m feeling too stressed to make sound decisions about how to while away an idle hour, and anything new seems too taxing to focus on properly.  My wife plays The Sims (in all its many and sundry variations) for pretty much the same reasons. 

I wonder about this part of myself, sometimes.  When my wife wants to retreat into something comfortable, she chooses something productive and constructive, shaping lives and helping people.  Virtual people, it’s true.  People who sometimes are too stupid to understand how to climb out of a pool if the ladder is taken away, to the point that they will drown, sure.  But still.  Meanwhile, I retreat into power fantasies and shoot aliens and eldritch abominations in the face, (occasionally pistol-whipping them and stabbing them with knives wherever applicable or preferable) over and over again.

But to this day, there is not a single computer I have owned (either personally or jointly) that hasn’t had Quake installed on it.  Even if I don’t have the urge to play it, I need to be able to play it pretty much on demand.

All of this is probably no more than a really long-winded way of explaining that it’s difficult for me to be critical about this game.  But since that’s what I’m here for, I suppose I’d better try.

*             *             *

In its design, Quake really adheres more to the old school than the new.  Of course, in its time, there were no schools, new or old, unless you wanted to make purely technological distinctions.  While it helped to usher in the age of 3D acceleration and specialized graphics cards, its overall structure is far more reminiscent of Doom, and to a certain extent Wolfenstein 3D before it.  The game is broken up into four episodes (the first one is shareware; this was toward the final days of shareware in general, I believe), each of which in turn is divided into discrete levels.  This is a far cry from, say, Half-Life (which came out just a year or two later), or Halo, both of which are split into chapters, but for narrative purposes rather than for reasons of game structure.

A criticism that has been leveled at Quake, and at Id Software games generally, is that the enemies are dumber than a sack of hammers.  They simply pursue the player once they become aware of him or her, and attack.  For a new-school FPS, this would be a problem.  But there’s a crucial difference between games of Quake’s vintage and most newer FPSes which makes this “problem” forgivable.

In my own personal experience, more recent FPS games tend to exist on a spectrum.  On one end, there are more linear games (like Half-Life, and Halo after the first one).  On the other end, they tend to be wide open (like Far Cry and Crysis).  The linear games usually direct you where to go next, either by designing the environment so that that it’s essentially a tunnel (figuratively speaking) with only one really clear path or objective in the first place, or else by resorting to on-screen markers pointing you in the desired direction.  The more wide-open games might place a destination on the map and tell you that you have to get there and do a thing, but leave the route and method of approach entirely up to you.  But the thing about these games, regardless of where on the spectrum they fit, is that they are focused almost exclusively on combat, and the structure of the environments is designed to control the pace of, and options available to the player in, combat.

Which isn’t to say that old-school FPS design shies away from combat, of course, because that would be a completely ridiculous thing to say.  Also, it would be untrue. 

But old-school FPSes do not rely exclusively on combat; they combine it with problem-solving.  Typically these problems takes the form of navigating your way through a maze, finding doors tucked out of the way, discovering which switches to hit to trigger changes elsewhere in the level, and finding the right keys and remembering where the doors they unlock are.  In this style of FPS, the enemies are more like an additional obstacle.  They may not be smart enough to employ squad tactics, take cover, flank, etc., but they don’t need to be. 

Each enemy has a specific way of moving and a set way of attacking.  They may not be intelligent in themselves, but their placement is fairly smart, and they’re one more element of the game that you need to learn.  You learn their patterns so that you can begin to out-maneuver them and attack when the time is right.  You learn their weaknesses so that you know which weapon (of the more than half-dozen you carry; another element of old-school FPS design) will damage them most.  You can evenlearn to exploit them, luring one enemy into attacking others, doing at least some of your work for you.  And if this still isn’t enough, you have the environments to worry about.  I don’t like to think of how many times I wound up traveling in endless circles in Satan’s Dark Delight or the Dismal Oubliette, wishing I could mix it up with some monsters, because that would be less frustrating than being lost.  There is something uniquely frustrating in being defeated not by any enemy, but instead by passive terrain features.

*             *             *

In terms of story, Quake may as well not have one.  What it has is less of a story and more of a premise, and not a terribly complex or interesting (or even particularly present) one.  You’re a soldier or Marine of some kind (because you always, always are, in games like this, unless it’s Half-Life, where you’re a physicist… who’s doing soldier-type shit).  The scientists at the base where you’re stationed have been working on a bit of technology called slipgates, which should in theory allow for teleportation.

Unfortunately, these aren’t one-way gates, and the demonic agents of an extra-dimensional entity known only as Quake are able to slip through and attack.  Your goal is to eliminate all enemies and destroy Quake.  Once you play through the last level of the first episode, your goal gets a little more concrete.  At the end of each episode is a rune key.  When all four are brought together, they will open a way to Quake’s realm.  While the episodes do escalate in difficulty, you can attack them however you like.

That’s pretty much it.  There are no real characters to speak of.  Quake, when you finally encounter it (it bears the name Shub-Niggurath, straight out of Lovecraft) has no dialogue and doesn’t really do anything besides require you to run through the most brutal gauntlet of the worst enemies the game has to offer (in multiples!).  Finishing a given episode (even the game itself) results in nothing more spectacular than a still shot of the environment you fought in and a brief crawl of text letting you know what happened.  This is maybe a half-step above “Your princess is in another castle” storytelling.

But I wasn’t playing Quake for the story back in 1997, and I don’t play it for the story today.  Nobody did.  Nobody does.

You play Quake purely for the rush of it, and the atmosphere.  The dark, grim, gritty, bloody feel of it.

*             *             *

Like a lot of technological achievements, Quake was mind-blowing in its time, and is pretty quaint today.  It’s difficult to imagine someone new to the genre, who grew up on Halo and Call of Duty and more modern FPSes, really enjoying Quake the way I and people my age do.  For younger players, it must have all the appeal of a high school history lesson.  And yet…

Id Software knew how to work well within limitations.  Quake’s technology was at the bleeding edge of what was possible at the time.  But as true as that is, even then, no one was ever going to mistake Quake for reality, and Id knew it.  As 3D graphics go, the engine was rudimentary.  It was incapable of rendering a natural, organic environment.  Knowing this, Id chose rather to play to the strengths of the engine.  If you can’t make natural environments, so be it; make the most unnatural environments you can manage.

There’s no better example of this to be found than Hexen II, developed by Raven Software using the Quake game engine.  Hexen II isn’t a bad game at all, but the ambition of its design occasionally exceeds the capabilities of the software.  Walking around in more natural outdoor areas, you really start to see the seams, so to speak.  Mounds of turf and grass just look wrong rendered in sharp angles and simple geometric shapes.

Quake aims to make you uncomfortable with just how unnatural its environments are.

Each episode starts with a level that’s meant to represent a high-tech military installation with a slipgate in it.  As you fight your way through these, machinery grinds and groans and hums and thrums in a way that you know makes the whole room vibrate.  It doesn’t matter that there’s no way to express this during play (this was a little before the days of force-feedback).  You know it, just the same.  When you run through these levels, you understand, in your gut, that the floor beneath your feet is shaking ever so slightly.  Doors open and close, and lifts rise and fall, with a whine of hydraulics and a deep, muted banging of metal that makes everything feel substantial.

The remaining ninety percent of the game occurs in a series of nightmarescapes comprised of castles, fortresses, dank grottoes, and labyrinths, all shot through with a touch of eldritch horror.  Think of it as a sort of gothic-medieval Lovecraft-lite.  All looming towers and dark stonework and thick, half-rusted-out iron, and everything joins at hard angles.  The world is rough and unforgiving and sparse.  These are places that were meant to be defended, but never really lived-in.  There is a sense of tremendous, ponderous, oppressive weight to these rough-hewn hulks of stone and metal which any number of more recent games, rendered with far finer and more minute detail, have failed to capture.

But it isn’t all the visuals, oh no.  The sound is part of it, too.

All these years later, there’s something deeply satisfying about how crisp and distinct the various effects are.  There’s something almost comforting about the clear POP…pong… pong, pong tones of a grenade launching, then bouncing until it contacts a target.  Or the deep, crunchy, percussion of said grenade exploding.  Or the sharp rasping sound whenever you pick up ammunition.  Or the grinding, slightly electric-guitar sound when you pick up a health pack.  Or the music.  Dear God, the music…

To call most of the Quake soundtrack music is to use music’s most technical definition, which is to say that it is a series of sounds deliberately orchestrated to achieve a specific effect.  The desired effect, incidentally, is to creep you right the fuck out.  So Id recruited someone from their Doom fanbase to compose the soundtrack, and that someone was Trent Reznor.  This much could not have gone more perfectly.

The soundtrack is not bad, not even remotely.  But it’s difficult to describe in typical musical terms – harmony, melody, beat, rhythm, etc.  None of those really apply.  Quake’s soundtrack is in no way radio-friendly.  It’s full of all sorts of intermingling swells and pulses of sound and samples produced by no discernible instrument (beyond probably a synthesizer), calculated to create a deep sense of unease.  Like the physical environments themselves, the “music” is dark and sinister, unnatural, uncomfortable, and utterly alien.  You can play the game without it, should you choose, but it really heightens the atmosphere, and should absolutely accompany the experience if at all possible.

*             *             *

The thing about a story is that while it provides a reason for what does happen, and an overall sense of structure, as a consequence of this, it puts limits on what can happen.

In itself, this isn’t a bad thing at all.  Stories have to have limits, rules, however you want to think of them, for the same reasons games (of any type) require them.  Rules provide structure and meaning for the actions within the story.  If anything can happen, then nothing that does happen matters.  An occurrence matters pretty much in direct proportion to its unlikelihood.  The more rare, the more remarkable.  This requires rules.

The thing is that the rules of a story are not the same as the rules of a game.  The rules of a story – a good story – are logical, in that they make sense within the context set forth by the story itself.  There must be internal narrative consistency.  A game’s rules are mechanical, and demand consistency only so far as the mechanics themselves go.  It’s always nice when a game manages to marry its story to its mechanics, because it gives the mechanics more psychological weight, and gives the narrative a greater sense of immediacy and urgency.  But “nice” isn’t the same as “necessary”, and sometimes throwing out that connection is what works best.  The makers of Quake must have come to understand this quite well, because it’s apparent as early as level two of episode one that there was no real unifying principle or concept (let alone something as solid as a coherent plot), or even much more than the vague suggestion of a narrative structure. 

“Games need stories like porn needs stories” someone at Id – I believe it was John Carmack, but I may be wrong – once famously said (I’m paraphrasing, but I’m using the same comparison he did).  The developers appear not to have been really troubled by their lack of a story, and it shows in the game’s aesthetics.

Lest you think I mean this as a criticism, I feel obligated to say that this utter lack of shit-giving could not have gone more right.

Quake’s development process might charitably be described as “higgledy-piggledy”.  It began, in the minds of the developers at Id, as a fantasy role-playing game of sorts, starring an axe-wielding barbarian who would himself be named Quake.  I remember reading this in an interview printed somewhere in the strategy guide for Doom II, years (decades) ago.  This was back when Id, like the Beatles, were probably bigger than Jesus for some people.

Of this original idea, only the title (which is now completely arbitrary, even in context), the axe (it’s your character’s melee weapon), and some medieval-ish castles remain.  The game itself got compromised into a nominally sci-fi first-person shooter with a light patina of H.P. Lovecraft.  You have possessed soldiers wearing Kevlar and wielding shotguns, and you have possessed knights swinging bloodied swords at you.  You have ogres who attack by throwing grenades from a distance, and slicing you with a chainsaw when they get up close, and you have giant shamblers, bipedal white behemoths who will wreck you with their claws if they get close, and shoot lightning at you from afar.

And it’s carried off like a grand Bavarian Fire Drill.  Id just showed up looking authoritative, acting like they knew what they were doing, and because of that, we all just sort of went with it.  Chainsaw-wielding ogres in arcane fortresses don’t make sense, you say?  Especially not alongside all the other weirdness?

Eh, screw it. 

And really, who cares?  Quake, the game, clearly doesn’t care about any of this sense-making business, and neither should you.  Why on Earth (or any other plane) would you?  What has sense done for you lately?  Has it let you shoot ogres in the face with a shotgun, or blow up zombies with a grenade launcher, or take down demonic spider-creatures with a gun that shoots pure lightning, or electrocute a giant lava-dwelling creature while it throws fireballs at you?  Ever?

No?

Well, then, quit worrying about sense.  Go play Quake.

*             *             *


Author’s Note:  While getting Quake to run as-is on modern PCs is apparently sometimes an exercise in teeth-grinding, hair-pulling frustration, there are a number of source ports which allow the game to run on modern machines with all sorts of bells and whistles.  These are completely free, and absolutely worth the effort to track down.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Behind the Gun – Wolfenstein: The New Order

I was eleven, and it was winter.  I can’t remember if it was late in 1992 or early in 1993; I just remember that it was winter, and I was eleven.  My father had recently been promoted to an office position of some kind at the company he works for, and occasionally, he’d bring home disks with shareware games on them.  This was back when you could get a reasonably full-featured experience on a 3.5” floppy disk that held less than a megabyte and a half of data.

He came home one afternoon, fired up the PC, and popped a disk in.  A few minutes later, he called out, “David, come here!  You have to see this!”  About a minute after that, I was watching my father mow down Nazis with a machine gun.  There was blood everywhere.  “You have to try this,” he said, stepping away from the computer desk and letting me take a seat behind the keyboard.

I was floored.

That same year (if I remember it right), Mortal Kombat hit the arcades, and it was the kind of game that, at ten or eleven, I could never, ever admit to my parents that I had played.  They’d heard of it, and they didn’t particularly care for what they’d heard.  I didn’t have a system that could play it when it eventually made its way to consoles, but pretty much all of my friends did.  We were all at that stage that I suspect a lot of young boys go through, where there is a certain lurid fascination with violence and destruction in all its forms.  Maybe that was just me.  But, looking back, there certainly has to be a reason the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat, which kept all the blood and violence in their version of the game (locked behind only a simple password; and if I remember correctly, the initial run of the game lacked even that token gesture) sold better than the Super Nintendo version, which was much more like the arcade in graphics and sound (and whose controller was far better suited for fighting games), but cut out all the blood and the more violent moves.

Now, here was my father, ushering me in front of the computer to take my first stab at Wolfenstein 3D, inviting me to take a shot at turning Nazis into little more than puddles of gore.  I learned a valuable lesson that day: Games where you rip out someone’s spine are bad, and you shouldn’t play them.  Games where you shoot and stab your way through an ever-growing mound of corpses to eventually wind up facing Hitler himself (in the registered version, which we eventually got), and riddle him with so many bullet holes that his body essentially liquefies, leaving only his dismembered head atop the resultant pile of viscera and gore, are A-OK.

My father, ladies and gentlemen.

*             *             *

I have a friend at work, Brendon, who describes certain games as “the right kind of stupid”.  This was his assessment of Wolfenstein: The New Order, and the way he talked about it, I started wanting to play it.  I had fooled around a bit with 2002’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which I think was intended as a reboot for the series.  I had sunk a bit more time into 2009’s Wolfenstein, enough to determine that the game was entertaining, and generally enjoyable, but not really a must-own.  I’d be happy to own it cheap, but I wasn’t going to go far out of my way to track down a copy.  I was content to let The New Order slide right on by.  But Brendon’s recommendation intrigued me, so I decided to pick up a copy, figuring that it would at least be entertaining.

Instead, I found myself pretty thoroughly hooked.  Wolfenstein: The New Order is very well-made, and surprisingly appealing.

In terms of mechanics and structure, The New Order offers a surprising mix of stealth and full-bore action.  On the one hand, you’re encouraged to shoot like crazy.  You can basically dual-wield every weapon.  If you want to run around with a shotgun in each hand, reducing Nazis to a fine red vapor, you’re welcome to it.  The game will certainly indulge you at every turn.  As long as you aren’t an awful shot, and you know how to pick the right tools for the job, you can get away with that. 

On the other hand, there are a number of sections that aren’t scripted as straight-up free-for-alls.  The enemies may be on patrol, but won’t notice you until you draw attention to yourself.  If you can take out the officers in an area before they can sound the alarm, you can prevent them from sending reinforcements, making your life easier throughout several sections of the game.

Early on, you’re offered the choice of whether to save supporting character or another.  The choice has a few narrative consequences down the line (though this is mainly window dressing, since the plot and the missions given never change), but it also has a deeper mechanical impact.  Saving one character results in you getting upgrades to your maximum health periodically as you play through the game.  Saving the other instead allows you to increase the resilience of armor you pick up as you go.  The mechanical difference places a subtle emphasis on more careful, stealthy play on one path, and more active running and gunning on the other.

As you go, you can unlock various perks, which cause you to gain various skills – faster reloading, quicker movement while crouching (which means less likely detection when you’re trying not to be seen), greater accuracy with certain weapon types, etc.  These are typically unlocked by completing various feats of skill with consistency, and while none of them are strictly necessary, they can help a great deal.

I have a few gripes with the controls, which ultimately feel kind of petty, but in the interest of not sounding completely uncritical, I suppose should name them.  The button used to throw grenades and bring up the weapon select wheel are the same (at least on the PS4; I assume all the console versions have the same control layout); it does the former and the latter based on whether you just tap the button or whether you hold it.  Sometimes, it seems to have difficulty determining which.  If you tap the button for longer than a half-second, it can interpret this as a “hold”, and bring up the weapon wheel when you’re trying desperately to throw a grenade.  Likewise, there’s a difference between just pressing and  holding the right stick, which results in the difference between a standard melee attack and throwing your knife, which the controller seems to occasionally have trouble interpreting. 

Probably the most annoying mechanical issue, though, is related to picking up items and armor.  Your cursor has to be pretty much pinpointed on the item, and you have to be pretty close to it, to register that you can pick up the item in question.  It’s not a thing that breaks the game, but it can be frustrating to be killed while trying to grab a health power-up that could keep you alive, because you weren’t lined up with it just so.

But, as I said, complaining about these things just seems petty because ultimately, very, very few of them really contributed to lingering problems I had with the game.  Most of my problem was with the difficulty in spots, and even that requires some explaining.

I play a lot of first-person shooters, but I’m not especially picky about them.  I tend to get interested in games based on their story, atmosphere, and the more nebulous characteristic of “feel”.  What it amounts to is that I’m just not a connoisseur.  My primary (read: only) metric for judging games in this genre is “Is this fun?”  Or, more accurately, “Is this fun enough to keep playing despite the occasional bullshit?”  It’s important to understand that for most people’s purposes, “bullshit” is probably best defined as “sections that are frustrating and difficult for me on normal difficulty, but I’m too bullheaded to rethink my approach and do things in a more careful, intelligent way (which is to say, a way that is careful and intelligent at all), and too stubborn to turn the difficulty down a notch”.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m not sure I’d exactly recognize good FPS play versus bad.  I find myself occasionally in situations where I’m suddenly being shot at by enemies, or damaged by hazards, beyond the immediate viewing area, and can’t find them and escape quickly enough to avoid getting killed.  There are a few spots where this seems to happen multiple times, and the game stops being fun for a while, and starts to become work.  But I’m rarely certain whether this is bad game design, or just one more instance among many of me being awful at the game.

The New Order’s game design itself is an interesting mix of old school and new.  On the new-school side of things, we have regenerating health and auto-save checkpoints.  On the old-school side of things, we have the fact that health doesn’t regenerate completely (just to the closest full increment of 20 health points), and the ability to carry about a dozen guns at once.  The game also has no online play mode.  There’s just the campaign (which is, thankfully, long enough and substantial enough to justify the price of admission), which you can play a second time after choosing to save the other support character at the end of the first section for a somewhat different story and different set of upgrades, as mentioned above.  For some people, this is a major strike against the game.  Me, though… 

I’m a weirdo who hardly ever plays FPSes online.  I’ve spent a bit of time playing Halo 4 online (and experimented with Halo 3 and Halo Reach for about an hour, total, combined), but mostly with random strangers, so that I might as well be playing with bots.  And there’s Destiny, which is pretty much the same way so far.  So in that sense, the campaign-only philosophy behind Wolfenstein: The New Order never bothered me.  On the contrary, it’s pretty much what I was hoping for.  I like to settle in for a long single-player session.  I like the notion that after an hour or two, I will have barely scratched the surface, that there’s a lot more to go, as long as it stays fun and varied.

I also liked reading The Wheel of Time, so take away from that what you will.

*             *             *

It’s always strange to find a well-done story in an FPS.  They’re not unknown, exactly, and the genre has undeniably become more sophisticated and nuanced since the days when these games were all just called “Doom-clones”.  But this is still a genre where most of the development time goes into making sure that the guns all look, sound, and feel as much like real guns as possible.  Probably more so than most other genres, FPSes are intensely technology-driven.

So to see the story well done, even occasionally thoughtful, in Wolfenstein: The New Order is pretty surprising.  I don’t necessarily mean this as an insult to the rest of the Wolfenstein franchise, but Wolfenstein 3D was created by Id Software, famous at one point for the belief that games need a story about as badly as porn does.  Granted, they simply oversaw the development of The New Order, rather than making it themselves, but still.

To start, I wouldn’t even call it the right kind of stupid, because honestly, it’s not any kind of stupid.  It looks like it should be stupid.  The hero, William J. “B.J.” Blaskowicz, looks like the dictionary definition of a meathead: A tall, broad-shouldered, crew-cut soldier with the build of a heavyweight MMA fighter and a jaw that could only be more square if it was rendered using a single, actual square.  His voice is low and rough, raspy even when he whispers, and there’s a hint of a Texas drawl.  George Washington was not this American.  And Blaskowicz is not always terribly thoughtful. 

Yet The New Order is smart with his characterization.  It understands that a person like Captain Blaskowicz is not going to be well-balanced.  His tendency to attack Nazis on sight – including a former Nazi in the resistance group, before he knows better – comes from years spent fighting them.  His fervent belief in America (he believes in America the way some people believe in God) seems to come from a deep-rooted need, more than anything else, to believe that there must be some group that is as good as the Nazis are evil, which can stand against them.  He doesn’t take it well when it’s pointed out to him by a black man that America has its own uncomfortable problems with race, and that from this character’s perspective, the average white American (of whom Blaskowicz is practically the poster child) isn’t nearly as different from the Nazis as Blaskowicz would like to believe.

That The Last Order even had an exchange like that surprised me.  I’m not knowledgeable enough about these things to say for sure how well it was handled, but I was impressed at the way the game let the exchange play out, without compromise.  I can’t recall the exact dialogue.  The character making the point is J, who is heavily implied to be Jimi Hendrix in this alternate history of how the war played out.  But I don’t need to recall the exact dialogue.  The point of J’s argument is pretty clear. 

It goes something like this: “You want to think of America as this place of pure equality and freedom, and it’s not.  There’s a deep hypocrisy in it when it comes to people like me, and the truth is we have it pretty bad there.  Our problems aren’t institutionalized like they are here in the heart of Nazi Germany, but in some ways that’s worse.  It’s easier to repeal laws than it is to repeal a deeply entrenched, culturally embedded mindset that’s upheld by tradition in a thousand subtle ways.  And don’t try to bullshit me on this.  You can’t; whatever you might think about it, I know.” 

And the thing that impresses me about it is that there is no compromising, no mealy-mouthed revisionism or white-washing of the facts.  J says it, and B.J. can only clench his fists in futility and fume about the ugly truth of it.

In a lot of ways, that was the kind thing that kept surprising me about The New Order: the way that it kept bringing up these surprisingly well-written passages.  Here’s one from the opening, where B.J. is dreaming of a future he becomes increasingly sure he’ll never have: 
“…children, a dog, and I see someone.  I think I see someone.  These things, none of it for me.  I move by roaring engines, among warriors.  We come from the night.”

So The New Order takes this character who has been little more than a mere avatar, who had less personality than Mario, and gave him a personality.  We glimpse it in flashes, here and there; it’s sketched in more than spelled out.  But that works.  It suggests more than it says, and gives us space to imagine and be curious. 

It’s funny.  The game is billed mostly as a balls-to-the-wall action extravaganza.  And it is that, more or less.  As in Wolfenstein 3D of yore, you will stride to victory over a mountain of bloody, ragged corpses.  But just as the game unexpectedly rewards careful planning and a certain amount of stealth, so does the story have these quiet, thoughtful moments, where you see the toll this type of conflict is taking on the characters.  Blaskowicz and Solid Snake could have some conversations, I’m sure.

And through it all is a sense of uncertainty about the purpose of everything he’s doing.  “Is there anything left worth saving?” he wonders.  And well he might, because in The New Order, the Nazis have won.

*             *             *

Wolfenstein: The New Order doesn’t beat you about the head and shoulders with its backstory.  It lets you play through some of it.  The first chapter of the game takes place in 1946.  Germany is winning the war.  Those of you who know your history already know that something is off.  There is a scientist on the German side, Wilhelm Strasse, who is usually called General Deathshead by the Allies.  Strasse would like you to know, however, that despite his name, he is a very happy man, and he would prefer you say his name in German, because it sounds wrong in English.  Toten… kopf.  This man is basically the reason Germany is winning.  His inventions, decades ahead of their time, have given Germany the edge.  The game opens with B.J. Blaskowicz on a last desperate mission to infiltrate Deathshead’s fortress and eliminate him.

The mission fails.

While attempting to escape after everything goes pear-shaped, Blaskowicz is caught in an explosion.  Shrapnel is embedded in his brain.

He spends the next fourteen years in a catatonic state.

When he finally wakes up, it’s 1960, and the Nazis have won.  They conquered all of Europe, Russia, Africa, and the British Isles.  They forced the U.S. to surrender by dropping an atom bomb on New York and vaporizing Manhattan.  They have most of China (and are in the process of taking the rest).  B.J., in the one real narrative misstep, comes back to the world pretty much as he left it fourteen years ago, without a trace of muscular atrophy and only a passing mention of any dizziness or disorientation. 

From the asylum where he was being cared for, Blaskowicz makes his way to Berlin, where any resistance groups’ members are imprisoned.  There, he breaks out whichever support character you saved in the beginning of the game, and is led to the re-formed Kreisau Circle, the resistance group from the previous game.

MachineGames, who developed The New Order, took a page out of Half-Life 2’s book and opted not to force-feed you the events of the fourteen years our hero spent in catatonia.  Throughout the game (mainly in the resistance group’s headquarters), you’ll find significant newspaper clippings posted, which will give you snippets of the history you’ve missed.  You’re left to read these or ignore them as you like, and put the pieces together on your own.  But they don’t want to just tell you what happened.  They want to show you the effects of it.

So you have weird little oddities like Die Kafer, a group of four musicians from Britain (Liverpool, to be exact), who are forced to either learn to sing pro-Nazi songs, and in German, or face jail time and banning.  You have other bits of strangeness like The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” being sung in German, to the accompaniment of tuba and accordion.  It doesn’t add much to the play of the game, but it’s a nice little touch of “what if” that you don’t often see.

*             *             *

In a way, it’s frustrating to say that a game is more than the sum of its parts, because the sum is much harder to describe than the parts are.  But that’s exactly where I find myself with Wolfenstein: The New Order.  There isn’t one thing I can single out and say “This!  This is what’s great about this game!”  Because the honest truth of it is that there is no one thing that really excels about The New Order.  It’s just put together exceptionally well.  Everything is solid, everything fits so neatly and tightly together.  It’s difficult not to recommend.  About the only turn-off I can see for anyone would be the violence.

I wouldn’t call the violence in The New Order excessive, but I would say it’s unflinching.  If you shoot someone in the head with a shotgun at close range, you have to expect that you’re going to have a mess on your hands.  That’s just an inescapable fact.  The New Order doesn’t really revel in that violence, or shove your face in it, or allow you (or command you) to do outlandish, over-the-top things.  But by the same token, it never shies away from that violence, and the technology is good enough that you can see things only trauma ward doctors and nurses typically do.

As I think about The New Order, I keep coming back to one of the big questions of its story, asked early on,  which is “what point is there in fighting?”  There is no more war. The Nazis are entrenched everywhere, and have been so for nearly 14 years.  There’s a whole generation of children growing up indoctrinated with Nazi ideology, for whom the Nazis’ ideas of right and wrong came to them as naturally as mother’s milk.  They are in the process of wiping out whole cultures, destroying them and sculpting the remains in the Nazis’ own image.  So what if you kill Deathshead (who is implied to be the real power in the world)?  You killed a leader – big deal.  The whole institution of Nazism, and the world it dominates, is still there, and it’s going to fall apart just because one man died, no matter who that man is.  It will take a lot more than that to topple an established government.

This unspoken despair is part of the story, too.  The answer to it is not comforting, but it’s probably the best answer you could hope for in these circumstances.  “We fight because we have to, because we must, because we can’t do anything else”. 


Bleak, but compelling.