Re-Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Cyrodil Faffed

eso 2014-05-19 20-58-55-644 It seems like none of the screenshots that I took last night… actually got saved to the disk.  Not sure what is up but over the last few days I have had Dxtory flake the hell out on me.  I’ve used it lately to capture screenshots while streaming because OBS and Fraps seem to piss each other off.  That said something seems to have changed in the mix and I couldn’t get Dxtory working on steam games Tuesday night, and last night it apparently was not taking any screenshots while streaming.  Anyways as a result you get a cool screenshot of Coldharbor instead of a screenshot of what actually happened last night.  What happened you ask?  Well we had our second “Faff About in Cyrodil” night as a guild and while we had fewer people than last time I feel like we got more cool stuff accomplished.

We started off hunting skyshards and that morphed into delving into a whole bunch of dungeons.  Along the way we had a few blips of PVP that surprisingly enough we not only survived by dominated.  We of course has the numbers advantage, but last week that did not matter at all as I saw a dozen of us get taken down by 3 veteran players.  That seems to be the key difference, this week I was a veteran player, and could in theory “tank” the players we were up against.  We found a really awesome town full of repeatable quests that just happened to have a dolmen in the center of it.  We managed to get two Dark Anchor spawns while we were there, and towards the end of one of the battles we had another guy jump in and try and gank us while we were fighting the demons.  Thankfully once again the power of veteran rank won the day.

It is disturbing how much of a difference that makes.  Just being 50 out in Cyrodil seems to completely even the playing field.  At one point we ended up getting attacked by a Veteran Rank 8 player, and still we were able to dispatch him handily.   So the moral of the story is…  Cyrodil sucks if you are not at least 50.  I have an idea of maybe pairing up into dungeons next week during the same time slot, but if that doesn’t work we will just break out and do more cyrodil.  There is still a ton of area left to explore.  The map is huge, a point that was not fully driven home until the end of the above video when myself, Delevax, Horli and Scopique attempted to run back to the way shrine.  It was a really really long run.

Re-Return to Castle WolfensteinWolfNewOrder_x64 2014-05-20 20-15-44-19

First let me get this out of the way… I have a boyish untarnished love for all things Wolfenstein.  The original game is on my 15 gaming influences list, because it truly was the game that turned me away from console gaming in the first place.  All of that said… I found the last jaunt through the Wolfenstein universe extremely disappointing… even for an admitted fanboy.  In theory Wolfenstein: New Order is a continuation of the story arc started with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, continued in the self titled Wolfenstein and finished up in this game.  That story arc involves trying to stop the dastardly Wilhelm Strauss otherwise known as Deathshead.  Whereas the original game was all about tackling Hitler himself, the modern incarnations have shifted into something more malleable, and it works for the most part.

WolfNewOrder_x64 2014-05-20 19-21-29-71 I am fairly notoriously against game introductions, and prefer the game just to plunk me down unceremoniously at the beginning of a level.  That said I have to say the easing into the storyline here in Wolfenstein is one of the more enjoyable introductions I have played through.  They manage to pepper just enough action into what would other be a cinematic to make me feel like I am actually part of it.  The game starts with us trying to land on the island held by Deathshead, and having to content with both Anti-aircraft guns and the ubiquitous Nazi flying V attack fighters.  I am not sure of the specific hardware we are flying into the base but it is some sort of bomber with a forward mounted ball turret, that you actually end up manning at one point during the sequence.  When you finally land on the island you are sent ahead to try and break through the defenses and allow the rest of your team to move forward.

WolfNewOrder_x64 2014-05-20 19-50-31-03 All of this works really well, and I found the storming gun nests aspect of it exhilarating.  Moments later you are involved in what I feel is the single coolest sequence in a modern shooter.  You fire up these really cool grappling hook guns and then walk up the side of the castle as the winch slowly retracts the cable pulling you up with it.  As you go up you encounter all sorts of obstacles, not the least of which are German soldiers opening the windows and firing out at you.  I am not sure exactly what it is about this sequence, but I wish I could play it over and over.  Everything about it just feels really damned epic.  Once you get to the top, your job is to unlock the gate so that the rest of the party can come up from the bottom to meet you.

WolfNewOrder_x64 2014-05-20 20-01-57-56 I am not really sure how they pulled this off, but the game FEELS like a spiritual successor to the original Wolfenstein and even to Doom.  Sure there is the standard sneaking about trying to knife soldiers before they see you gameplay that all of the modern shooters seem to be riddled with.  However there is also a much more arcade “run and gun” feel to the game that works.  I don’t have to play it in a style where I duck behind cover every few seconds for fear of taking a bullet.  You can ping pong around taking out soldiers left and right in an insane ballet that only works in the movies.  I mean you can dual wield machine guns… and it feels amazing, so if it is hyper realism you are looking for… go somewhere else.  This feels like a return to the area when these games were actually fun to play, and not simply this seasons multiplayer fodder.

WolfNewOrder_x64 2014-05-20 19-56-49-48 Right now after seeing and playing this for awhile, I have so much hope for what this might mean going forward.  Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and the eventual Enemy Territory addon… represents the most fun I have ever had playing an online shooter.  I hope and pray that they give us a multiplayer DLC that is every bit as brilliant as RTCW and ET were.  This is a game I actually want to play online.  In the meantime I am going to devote more time to beating the single player campaign as at this point I literally have not talked about anything that is not included in the “introduction”.  Things get gloriously strange as you move forward and the entire world is a sort of nod to the book Fatherland, setting up a dark and stranger alternate history for the events of World War 2.  Thank you Machine Games, and ID for giving us the Wolfenstein we have wanted for so long.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Wolfenstein #RTCW