The idea behind The Old Blood was to make it a love letter to one of our favorite installments in the franchise, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. We've always tried to do our best when it comes to storytelling in games because that is where our interests lie: in that fusion between good, meaningful interaction and storytelling that feels like something beyond pointing a gun and shooting at things.

We wanted The Old Blood to feel like a palate-cleansing dessert a nice finish packed full of flavor and personality, rather than the full-course meal that came before it with The New Order.ĭid the team expect to receive such critical praise for the narrative techniques at play in The New Order? How did that influence your decision to make a standalone prequel instead of DLC? With this shorter development time in mind, we chose to put the emphasis on recreating the old-school atmosphere found in Return to Castle Wolfenstein and to tell our story entirely from a first person perspective. One of the most striking things about The Old Blood is that it's a very substantial prequel with interesting combat encounters but little of the character development that earned The New Order critical appeal. Was that a conscious design decision?ījörk: Because it was important to us to get new content out to fans as soon as we could, we knew from the beginning that we would not be creating the same kind of cinematic cut-scenes that we had in the main game. He also shed some light on how Machine Games approaches the challenge of telling a compelling narrative from a first-person perspective, and why it chose to break from popular DLC design practices to produce a standalone prequel, in a recent conversation over email which I've reproduced (with some light edits for clarity) below. Machine Games' Tommy Tordsson Björk says this is spot on that Blazkowicz never actually spoke during the gameplay segments of The New Order, and only earned that voice in The Old Blood due to production constraints that kept the studio from using cutscenes as a storytelling tool.

'The dream is to make you feel like Blazkowicz, even though he speaks in your place,' Matthies told Gamasutra last year. 'the goal is to have a protagonist that is so relatable that you become them.'īut as I was playing through The Old Blood, Machine Games' recently-released standalone prequel to The New Order, I realized that I was actually hearing Blazkowicz speak through me for what felt like the first time. His Swedish stewards earned critical acclaim last year for their deft app roach to first-person storytelling via cutscenes and interior monologues, acclaim that creative director Jens Matthies credited to the studio's philosophy of directly marrying a game's narrative to the player's experience in the world.

Wolfenstein the new order cutscenes