Above: Wolfenstein: The New Order
GamesBeat: One of the things that was interesting here is that there is no multiplayer. You can put so much more into the single-player experience. You wound up with a game that’s probably twice as long as most other shooters right now. For me it was almost as long as playing The Last of Us, which was a pretty long game. It was almost two or three times longer than a typical Call of Duty game. It sounds like that was what you wanted to do.
Gustafsson: Yeah, it was. If we don’t have that multiplayer component—We’re a single-player studio. This is what we want to do. We want to do single-player games. We feel that this what we know how to do and what we want to do. But we also want to make sure that the players get their money’s worth. We would never be satisfied releasing a game that was over after only eight hours. It wouldn’t be enough.
We’ll continue working and trying to build on things in the story, but also to focus on a lot on exploration and optional content and things like that. I didn’t talk about this too much earlier, but you can approach scenarios with different play styles, play in different ways, take different paths. You can approach the game in many ways and make the game more interesting to return to. So we’re focusing a lot on that. We’ll continue to focus on that. Our goal has always been to release a game that’s an adventure. We don’t want that adventure to be too short.
GamesBeat: What have you discovered about some of the very best players? If you watch them on YouTube or playing on Twitch, the really expert players who may have gone through more than once, what do you notice about those players?
Gustafsson: We’re always amazed. Those are usually people who like the game a lot. We had our CTO come in and he could show us something from a guy who’s been playing for 50 hours. We’re glad people can come back and really like to play it again. And then of course you’re always impressed by the ways that players can approach certain areas. There are things some players do that would be impossible for me.
GamesBeat: If somebody played for 60 hours, how many times did they play through? Two or three?
Gustafsson: Yeah, probably. The thing is, it might also be someone replaying a favorite chapter over and over again.
GamesBeat: I also thought the story and the cinematics were interesting as well. I didn’t expect to see so much of that throughout the game.
Gustafsson: Oh, thank you.
GamesBeat: That was an unexpected pleasure, to have a good story to go with the game.
Gustafsson: That’s something we focus a lot on, always.
GamesBeat: The characters, at least one of them seemed inspired by Inglourious Basterds, the heroine, in some of her scenes. It made you want to beat them that much more.
Gustafsson: I’ll certainly ask our writer about that one. [laughs]
GamesBeat: Did you have any other comments?
Backman: I’ll mention one thing that I’m pretty sure you know from having played through it. You can unlock certain game modes to play in. There’s the Ironman you can play through, if you think the game is too easy. That means you have only one life, and you have to play the entire game in one sitting. It’s pretty hard.
GamesBeat: Has anyone completed that?
Gustafsson: I don’t know, actually. I don’t think so.
Backman: A lot of players have tried. But we don’t know of anyone finishing Ironman yet.
GamesBeat: I’ll have to watch for that.