While lots of games become more open as their series continue, with larger environments and less linear stories, that’s not the case with Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus: “We feel that Wolfenstein should be kind of what we are doing,” creative director Jens Matthies tells us. “We don’t feel like we should turn it into an open-world game or anything.”
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As to Wolfenstein 2’s pace – one of the things that made the first game sing – Matthies can only hope the same is true of the sequel, as they’ve designed it in the same way.
“It’s hard to say [how it will compare to the first game] because you can’t really quantify that until you have all the pieces in place,” Matthies says. “It’s always on a conceptual level at the beginning, where we sit as a group and we map out the game, and then we move a lot of those parts around.
“Once we come to start building the game we have on paper we have a good idea of the pacing that we feel really confident in. And then, as you start building the game, perhaps you iterate a little bit, or a level feels a little short, and you correct those things as you experience them, and at the end of this you have a game with a certain pacing. But it’s not like you go back to the first [design] and compare them – it’s much more organic than that.”
The developers can only trust that their taste and talent has steered them well as the project has taken shape, then.
“In some ways this game is opening up a little bit, in terms of gameplay,” Matthies adds. “But I don’t think it’ll feel like a drastically different experience. We feel that Wolfenstein should be kind of what we are doing, so we don’t feel like we should turn it into an open-world game or anything.”