Wolfenstein

[Mr. GOH!]

Can't believe this wasn't a topic already.

 

 

I played this for a few hours last night and have had a blast so far. The action is fast and brutal and the story and characters are by turns intense, silly, brutal, and interesting, at least so far. It remains violent and gory, as it should, and the shooting feels good using a gamepad. The cut scenes are nice, but they are endearingly lower-quality than the in-game graphics on my rig. I wonder if the PS4 Pro and Xbonex have that issue, too. It's not terrible, and other games have the same issue on PC, but it is noticeable. I haven't really gotten past the introductory set of missions yet, however.

 

I'll add to this thread once I've played more.

[TheMightyEthan]

I've never understood why developers render prerendered cutscenes at anything less than PC max graphics.  I get that they'll only be 1080p to save storage space, but even then they should supersample the hell out of it, and there's no excuse for any other aspect of the graphics to look bad.

[Mr. GOH!]

I think the counterargument would be that making cutscenes that look significantly better than the game itself would make the rest of the game look bad by comparison, particularly to players who did not game in the 90's and early 00's when prerendered cutscenes were always better than the gameplay graphics. Some PC games have optional 4k versions of cutscenes to download if you want higher-res cutscenes to go along with your 4k gameplay, but the memory cost can be staggering, I've heard.

 

But back to Wolfy 2. The game may have been largely made before the rise of so-called white nationalists to the forefront of Americans' attentions, but it most definitely engages in criticizing white nationalists' rhetoric in both the various news clippings, memos, and letters you can find and read in the world, to the NPC chatter between Nazis. In particular, while I was stealthing around a rocket train base, I overheard two Nazis talk about how terrorists (i.e., you, BJ Blazkowicz), are so bad because they just want to kill people who have different ideas than they do. One says "We're humans too, aren't we? We should resolve our disagreements peacefully!" It's a classic white nationalist argument that ignores the underlying desire to get the state to use violence on other races, heightened because these Nazis are heavily armed and then proceed to talk about how they hope their next assignment is on a death squad together.