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.