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id, Raven Developers Discuss New Wolfenstein
CVG is running an interview with Kevin Cloud, executive producer at id, and Eric Biessman, who leads Raven Software's programmers and artists, about the upcoming installment to the Wolfenstein series. They provide some detail about what kind of weapons will be available, what those crazy Nazis are up to this time, and BJ Blazkowicz's new ability to "shroud" himself.
"Press a single button, at any time, and you'll see the other side of reality: a green and violent dimension that's filled with strange creatures and whirling tornadoes of energy. Just being in the shroud gives you options: floating above the ground are 'collectors' - fleshy heavy metal album cover worms that are scavenging electrical energy. Pop them, with a single rifle round, and they'll blast apart, damaging enemies in the real world. They are essentially exploding, hidden, organic barrels. ...In shroud mode, too, occult symbols etched into the masonry are transformed into holes in walls that BJ can simply step, shoot, or lob a grenade through."
3DRealms has had duke nukem doing this for ages now.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Does anyone else hope that Id will throw in the original Wolfenstein gameplay, but with updated graphics?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Think of Wolfenstein once id gets a hold of it less as a forerunner or relative to realistic WWII shooters, and more like a video game equivalent of bad fifties and sixties pulps about those shooters (since the original games were pretty much pure jail-break stuff.) Wolf 3-D was pretty much exactly that, replete with the occult stuff, Mecha-Hitler, etc. (Keep in mind Wolf3D had gun-chested zombies!) Newer sequels can be thought of as evolving in parallel by reproducing more modern, serious, and perhaps sorta conspiracy theory-ish interpretations about what the Nazis did or thought they were planning on doing. I guess the genre could be called Nazi Sci-Fi/Fantasy or something.
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Anyone else think that the shroud mode sounds a lot like the spirit mode in Prey? Especially the part about symbols on the wall changing into things when you go into shroud mode.
Its way older than that. Prey only came out fairly recently. There was a vampire game, one of the legacy of Kain series from 1999 http://www.dark-chronicle.co.uk/sr1/index.php?id=2 I think. Perhaps even earlier implementations of shroud/spirit/reality shift etc. And I'm sure there are movies with this plot device too that pre-date even that.
Even Zelda on the Wii has this switching realms thing as a plot device. Pretty cheap to do too. change the lighting, put different texture maps on the models and characters, and you have double the gameplay with less effort. Put a switch to remove collision detection on the enemies in one ream, and you can even do things like walking through people when travelling in the ghost mode.
There is no reason to not use such a plot device. After all, a FPS is a FPS. The details and setting may change, but when it comes down to it, shoot the monsters, pull the switches, collect the tokens, and move on to bigger better monsters and weapons... and repeat on new map. Is there really any FPS that deviates much from this? Its a well tested successful format for a game, People like it, the engines, once created can be used to make more similar games, and making third party maps and mods is a well established shelf life extender.
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