No work of art has ever been considered a masterpiece for doing exactly what people expected from it. Picasso would be a lot less interesting if he drew faces properly and everyone prefers The Beatles after they discovered LSD. In the mundanity that is our everyday lives, it is novelty and subversion that makes art truly stand out and connect with us, even when it isn’t perfect.
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It’s this attitude of subverting expectations that makes Wolfenstein: The New Order, in my opinion, a fantastic achievement in video game storytelling. Everything from its mechanics to its story and characters is highly polished and well-designed on a surface level, but what makes it stand out in the saturated shooter market of the 21st Century is its almost aggressive subversion of audience expectations.
Today, I want to break down what works so well about The New Order and how it openly defied the cultural context that it was born into.
A Saturated Market
You don’t have to have been around the gaming scene in 2014 to be aware of the absolute glut of first person shooters that were coming out around that time. Call of Duty and Battlefield had reached their peaks and were on their way back down the mountain again. Doom (2016) wouldn’t be made for another two years, leavings fans of dismember first, ask questions later gameplay out in the cold. The few interesting examples that did exist, like Titanfall, were almost solely focussed on multiplayer and saw a linear single-player story as simply another ugly baby to be thrown out with the bathwater. As a result, the FPS market was in a bad place, somehow managing to be oversaturated and understimulated, like a giant vat of lukewarm porridge.
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Thus, Wolfenstein: The New Order set itself apart, firstly, by existing at all. A retro-inspired, single-player only shooter that focused predominantly on its characters and its setting? It was like Michael Jordan showing up to an under-12s basketball game to show them how it was done.
That being said, the game didn't hang its hand solely on the nostalgia hook either. In its gameplay, The New Order shared a lot with its as-yet unborn stablemate Doom (2016) by unifying the polish and quality of life improvements from modern FPS games with the hyperactive, retro sensibilities of early-90s shooters. The game starts you off with some simple stealth mechanics, silenced weapons and plain assault rifles like your average modern warfare shooter. However, by the halfway point, you’re firing dual-wielded sniper rifles and laser weapons on the moon. Its slow unveiling of its retro sentiments almost feels like it's trying to lull modern audiences into accidentally playing a retro shooter.
The way in which the game merges modern gameplay tweaks like aiming down sights and a robust cover system with more retro mechanics like dual-wielding and carrying more than two weapons in order to heal yourself gives the game a unique identity and also raises questions about why modern shooters needed to be the way that they were at all.
Take healing as a case in point. Most modern shooters had you crouch behind a wall and wait for all of the red goo covering your screen to fade away. It was straightforward and easily-understandable but, for many games, acted as a real pace killer when, in the middle of an intense gunfight, your stalwart war-hero had to curl up in a little ball and suck his thumb until he felt better.
By contrast, Wolfenstein follows the American healthcare model where you have to source your own healing supplies because what it provides for free will still leave you mostly crippled. This does the opposite for the pacing to what regeneration does where, instead of hiding, you are encouraged to push forwards or run backwards and explore the environment to find the necessary resources to survive.
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This stands out so nicely as a mechanic because, by forcing the player to act rather than encouraging them not to, the game creates opportunities for emergent gameplay and unique moments where players engage with the game and fight for their survival in an experience that is unique to them.
The marriage that The New Order facilitated between modern and retro shooters could very well have ended in a messy divorce and restraining orders but, through careful design, it makes it work. Thus, when the game released, it could boldly stand apart from its competitors by actually focusing on a single vision of what the game should be rather than blindly following what everyone else was hacking out. However, the subversiveness of The New Order wasn't just in relation to its competitors.
Denying the self
On top of the two-fingered salute that The New Order gave to the games industry at the time, it also feels like it exists in open defiance of its lineage. Wolfenstein's name recognition goes back to Wolfenstein 3D, the progenitor of the whole first-person shooter genre. As a result, The New Order has a lot of pedigree to it.
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However, there are many things that the game does that openly subvert what people expect from the series. Prior to The New Order the games all revolved around straightforward Second World War narratives. These were ultimately just a vehicle for massacring Nazis like it was Christmastime and we needed their skulls for use as inexpensive gravy boats. As a result, they never had any need for clever writing or strong characterisation, even in their lead character B.J. Blazkowicz.
The New Order changes things, however. Probably the smartest decision that The New Order made was flipping the script on B.J. as a character. In the past, B.J. was a brash American soldier, killing Nazis en masse in a war which, from history, we know he will inevitably win. It was a power fantasy because we knew that history was on our side.
In The New Order, however, no such logic applies. Taking place in the 1960s, The New Order is all about B.J. as the underdog fighting to liberate the United States from a post-war Nazi occupation. Immediately, our brash, all-American action hero is put in a position of vulnerability, allowing the writing team to take him to interesting places that previous Wolfenstein games could never have hoped to explore. Parallels are quickly drawn between B.J. fighting against the oppressive regime and his abusive upbringing to reinforce the feeling of powerlessness.
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Importantly, the game also uses its gameplay as a vehicle to tell this story. As mentioned, its retro-inspired gameplay leans on the side of ultra-violence by allowing you to blast Nazis limbs off with one shotgun in each hand and hack their corpses into Sashimi. However, while this does offer some catharsis in the moment, the story quickly throws a wet blanket over matters by reminding you that, despite all of your efforts, the Nazis are still in control and you are still fighting what looks like a losing battle. This contrast is highly effective because it helps the player to empathise with characters' struggles by making them feel the same cycle of extreme violence followed by the disappointment of only minor successes.
It helps that the characters are well-written. B.J. exudes vulnerability despite having a face like two bricks held together with a leather belt and his supporting cast all have their own traumas and reasons to fight. It both sells them as characters and creates interesting interpersonal moments. At times, characters have their doubts and concerns about whether what they are fighting for is even realistic or what it might do to their souls if they keep up their violent rebellion.
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Ultimately, the game works so well because the writing is just so damned human and full of character. All of this remember, in a series that had never really done any character work at all up to this point. That's what makes The New Order such a surprise. Not only is it very well written, it has no reason to be when it comes from a family of games that have previously treated deeper storytelling like The Communist Manifesto at a 4th of July parade. However, even its characters aren't The New Order's biggest subversion of expectations. No, in fact, the game goes much further, to the point where it challenges our very own view of history.
Re-writing history
The Second World War has an interesting history in video games. It's a setting that so many action games keep returning to because of how it is seen as one of the last 'uncomplicated' wars. Nobody in a sensible society is likely to raise a fuss over the core gameplay of killing Nazis after all.
However, these simpler, straightfoward renditions of the war have often left a lot to be desired from a historical perspective. So often, the temptation to create a bare-bones good vs evil narrative out of World War Two wins out over any attempts at deeper or more accurate storytelling. This is the final tradition that The New Order rails against because it, in many ways, refuses to sand down the war's more complex edges.
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At its heart, The New Order feels like an anti-war game. It seems strange for a game that encourages you to butcher Nazi soldiers, feed them to their own dogs and then leave the dog turds outside their families' houses but it comes through strongly in the theming.
There are multiple points throughout the game where characters sit and reflect on what they have been through and what they have had to do to others and they ask the question of whether it's all worth it. They're fighting a global Nazi occupation, you'd be hard pressed to find a more worthy cause. Yet, the sheer brutality of the war that they are engaging in and all of the human experiences that they are missing out on, like finding love and creating art, serve as a constant reminder that, no matter how righteous the cause, war is always hell and will always take a toll on those that fight in it. That's a hell of a lot of nuance for a game that, on the surface, is just another Nazi shooting gallery.
What's more, in addition to delving into the costs of war, The New Order doesn't shy away from the hypocrisies of it either. The best case in point for this comes in the inclusion of "J. Hendrix", Wolfenstein's alternate history version of Jimi Hendrix. It seems like the kind of thing that would be out of place in any serious game but, thankfully, it is executed fantastically as Hendrix's ideas of freedom and love endure meaning that, even in the face of a Nazi occupation, he is depicted as a pacifist.
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The highlight of Hendrix's inclusion is when B.J. tries to call him out for precisely this refusal to fight, even against the Nazis. Hendrix points out to B.J. that, while both of them are standing up to the Nazis, they are actually fighting for different causes. J wants a world without violence as he sees it as "the weapon of the man" no matter who "the man" is. He then points out that the USA that B.J. is fighting for was the same one that was happy to oppress Hendrix and his family before the war through Jim Crow Laws and other segregationist policies.
It's a stark moment of reflection and it makes you see the game's world and characters from a completely different perspective. It forces both B.J. and the player to contemplate what a future after the Nazi occupation would look like. B.J. immediately questions what he is fighting for and has to confront the fact that the Nazi occupation was not the beginning of all the world's problems, even if it felt like it for him. It's an excellent character moment that adds such depth to an already well thought-out narrative. It's exactly the kind of deeper theming that other big-budget shooters like Call of Duty would be too afraid of including for fear of alienating 0.6% of its audience.
As a history buff, this is why I hold The New Order in such high regard because, despite having an alternate history setting, it does such a good job of commenting on real history and using it to create compelling characters and moments. It's these moments that serve to flesh out the world that the developers have created and to make players think about the themes and ideas on display.
Conclusion
To round off, the best thing that The New Order does that not enough big-budget games do is that it makes an effort to be about something and all of its moments and systems are directed towards communicating that. To my mind, The New Order is the kind of game that Triple-A studios should be making more of and that is why it continues to be one of my favourite games ever made.
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