Wolfenstein: The New Order's cruel and unusual makers break down their process (postmortem)

GamesBeat: I tried not to use grenades too much. I felt like they were too precious, I guess. I remember, when you get out of the asylum and it’s a more open space, that felt harder, because the drones made you run around more. It was a little easier to get attacked from behind or out in the open.

Gustafsson: Yeah, yeah. It’s a big difference depending on the weapon you choose. A lot of people use the shotgun there. You have to save the ammo for the shotgun until they get in close.

GamesBeat: Or use a Tesla grenade at that point.

Gustafsson: Yeah.

GamesBeat: Whenever you make the level more difficult, are you also providing something that makes the player more powerful? Is that the thinking?

Gustafsson: Usually. You always need to give the players tools to overcome. We’re always trying to think about different approaches and play styles, being more tactical and so on. In the area you’re talking about now, after the asylum, there you’re in a position where you could run out of ammo. In that particular place we had to add infinite ammo boxes, just to make sure players wouldn’t get stuck. Those are difficult problems to deal with.

GamesBeat: One of the harder levels was also just after you get out of the trunk of the car. You go through that level, and there’s the next level where the big robot comes out and tries to stop you. The robot was a very difficult boss.

Gustafsson: Oh, when you go through the checkpoint with the grandmother and grandfather in the car.

GamesBeat: Yeah, yeah. You ride on the side of the car, and then you get pulled off. Can you talk about that level a little? I found I had to play that level a lot.

Backman: The third part, where the big robot is? There are basically three parts. There’s the first one, and then you get to the towers, and then the third part where you eventually meet the robot. It’s the third part you mean?

GamesBeat: Yeah. It was almost by the third part that it seemed like I was almost out of my weapons. I had used up a lot of more powerful weapons. I think I had to go back to the machine gun turrets as often as I could.

Gustafsson: We had a problem with that for a long time, because for many players, especially during focus testing, they didn’t realize that they could go out and use the turrets.

Backman: Especially, they didn’t understand that they could reattach and reload the turrets.

GamesBeat: I think I found a lot of ammo and grenades in one of the buildings. After that I had more armor and more grenades to throw. That helped. It felt good after I finally killed that robot.

Backman: One way for handling the robot, although it’s maybe not that obvious, the grenades are magnetic grenades, so they cling to robotic enemies. The robots are fairly easy to kill with grenades, because if you hit the right place, they stick. I guess that’s quite hard to realize. As the grenades were pretty small it was hard to see them sticking to the Robot, the smaller metal enemies such as the 1960 Kampfhundts and the Drones were small enough to see the grenades clinging but few players used grenades on those enemies.

GamesBeat: There was another very difficult level just before you go into the moon museum. It’s fairly early. You finish going into the blown-up building in London, and then you get through and you have to choose whether to fight on the ground level or go up the stairs. There was something I felt was a little tricky about that level. There was the room full of ammo when you turned left, and then stairs on the right and enemies coming at you from straight ahead.

Every time I went into the room on the left to get a bunch of ammo, I got cornered in that room and the enemies would come at me with grenades. I died every time I went to the left. But then I figured out I could go over to the right, up the stairs, and find another big room full of ammo on the right-hand side. Then I could fight from there and survive and take on all the enemies on the upstairs level. Then I’d finally fight the robot down at the bottom.

Gustafsson: That runway is one of my personal favorites. I really like the combat up there, because it’s so dynamic.

GamesBeat: There was one thing—I liked that level because you had a lot of enemies. You had a lot of variety. But I felt like there was really only one way to go. You could only survive it if you went to the right, up the stairs. If you stayed on the bottom, it felt like it was impossible to survive.

Gustafsson: That’s what’s part of the approach, though, to try to force the player to move forward and not stay in cover all the time. It also depends a bit, though—You might be interested to see our QA guys, because they would run straight forward and up the stairs and take the turret and do it that way. But for the average player, they usually have to go in, try to get as much ammo as possible, and then not stay there. They have to go up exactly the way you did, which is what I’d say is the preferred route.

GamesBeat: In some of the levels, it seems like there is a “right” way to play it.

Gustafsson: Ah…We try to keep the player engaged. In many ways, this is a linear game, but especially in these combat scenarios, we try to make it so the player has at least a few different options as far as how to play. We try not to force people. But we think it’s generally better if we try to take people along a more tactical path. We’ll continue to do that in future games we make. We’re looking to make the combat more dynamic, and also give more options to the player in terms of play styles.

GamesBeat: Can you talk about the AI and how smart the AI was?

Backman: It’s hard to say. The main thing that our AI does, it isn’t cheating. It doesn’t know things it shouldn’t know, ever. It cannot just know where the player is. The only way it can know that is if the commander tells them, “He’s here now!” or it hears you sprinting or hears your gun sounds. It’ll base its decisions on that. Even if you’re in combat, you can sort of sneak while in combat, because if you don’t fire, they won’t know what you’re doing. If nobody sees you and you aren’t firing, then they’ll have to just assume where you are. You can still sneak up on the AI while in combat.

That was a major basis for our level design. The scripters don’t have to plan every single situation. We can keep the AI from knowing too much and ruining a clever plan by the player.