Wolfenstein

Raven's new flavours
Raven has clearly brought a lot to the table that is sure to offer a unique Wolfenstein experience. With their FPS experience on titles like Quake 4, they were clearly up to the basic task, but Raven Creative Director, Eric Biessman, also points out that lessons and inspiration can come from many different places.

"From every project that you work on you take away lessons," says Biessman. "Some of them are hard lessons, when you learn an idea didn't resonate or work right. Some are awesome lessons where you see something work exactly the way you were hoping it would work."

"It is surprising to find how dramatically different game types - Marvel Ultimate Alliance vs. Quake 4, for example - can still yield great lessons that you can take to the next game. With that in mind, we really just set out to build on the strengths of the franchise and notch it up a level."

"With Wolfenstein, the guys started as fans of the universe and the previous games," says Biessman. "They all had favourite moments, characters, game play and weapons they knew they wanted to touch on in the game."

"Wolf is all about fast action and combat. We know we needed big weapons and evil enemies. We also needed to make sure that the strange occult and dark science that was so prevalent in the previous games came in strong. RTCW started with a mage sealing an evil knight into an eternal prison! We needed to make sure that carried on."

"That's how the Veil was born. We wanted to give the player the opportunity to really tap deeper into the occult side while still keeping that butt-kicking combat."

Under the hood
Kicking some tyres, the latest Wolfenstein is using a highly modified id Tech 4 engine. Dwight Luetscher, Technology Lead at Raven, filled us in on a lot of the juicy tech details. Like how they make those glowing greens so perfectly 'supernatural'.

"We wanted the highest quality lighting solution, so we rewrote the renderer to use deferred shading so we could handle hundreds of dynamic lights in any given view. We added soft shadows to the tech and have some of the best-looking shadows in the industry with no jaggies."

"We also had a number of new effects systems that do most of their work on the GPU, allowing us to put out thousands of particles per effect, instead of a few hundred. And there is a new post-process system that allows our artists to dramatically enhance the look of any scene."

"Seeing objects break apart and fly around as BJ is fighting with occult Nazi forces is really something," says Luetscher. "Especially with the Veil powers and supernatural weaponry spicing up the screen."

They've also now brought Havok Physics on board, so when Luetscher talks about objects breaking apart, he actually means that almost everything is dynamic and breakable. This can wreak havok (yep, I went there) with AI enemies, but Luetscher also tells us they've got it covered.

"Our AI has been enhanced to navigate this dynamic world and intelligently take cover in it. Plus the number of AI characters in a typical combat scene is usually three to four times more than what we used in Quake 4. In some scenes, there are swarms of AI characters that are over a hundred."

"We also added a streaming system that allows us to stream all kinds of game assets," says Leutscher, "including textures, geometry, animations and audio. This allows us to populate the Wolfenstein world with more detail and make the levels bigger, grander and more open."

When you've got a big, grand, open world, you'd better dress it up to look pretty epic. Kevin Long, Wolfenstein's Art Lead, tells us how they found blending real-life historic aspects of World War II with the sci-fi/fantasy spin.

"It wasn't overly difficult considering the real-life technological leaps made during WWII, the weird weapon designs from both the Allies and the Nazis, and the real-life occult practices and beliefs of the German Nazi Party and the SS."

"Raven was given free rein to create all sorts of outlandish weapons and creatures for Wolfenstein," says Long. "I believe they were very successful by keeping their designs within the timeline and technology of the 1940s. For example, the more outlandish looking weapons of Wolfenstein are all kind of 'out there' in their look and powers, but if you look at the overall design of those weapons, they look like they were created during the 1940s, using that era's manufacturing practices and technology."

So by what measure will Raven and id feel the new Wolfenstein has been a successful evolution of the franchise? Peter Sokal gets the final word.

"Our hope is that fans new and old will really enjoy this evolution. We hope the old-school guys immediately feel like they are playing a Wolfenstein game, and that new players get a truly fresh and unique experience that only Wolfenstein can deliver. If we accomplish that, then we will consider the game a success."

If you like the sound of Wolfenstein, don't forget to enter our Wolfenstein comp! Come play with us (not like that!) at Atomic HQ!