Hello everyone. So today we're taking a first look at Wolfenstein
The New Order on PC. Unfortunately, owing to a large number of technical problems
with this game on PC
a full review is probably going to be at the end of this week
maybe early next week. So, what is
new and special about Wolfenstein New Order? Well, this is the first Wolfenstein game
we've had in a fair old while
and the Wolfenstein games in general have a very long legacy, I mean
quite literally stretching back to the dawn of modern PC games.
Certainly it was the first game to really deliver a 3D
environment and a first-person shooter together, even if that 3D environment
was actually
a 2D environment with 3D planes. At the time
it was a technical marvel and it really did set fire
to our industry. Now this new game is not being made by the original creators
but does seem to have been lavished with the same kind of love and respect
that we know from the Wolfenstein series of old. Interestingly,
the game engine is using ID Tech 5 or
ID Tech 5 which was created by John Carmack who no longer works at ID
but obviously is still considered one of the luminaries really
of the video games industry. When he speaks
people listen. Now really important here
the ID Tech 5 engine is the same engine that was used for a game called
Rage about three years ago. Now that game had a very specific
technical achievement with the engine and that was known as mega
texture.
Now what the mega texture allows you to do is to
essentially throw very, very large textures at the screen
but only render them when the person
ie. the player is actually looking at the texture
and depending on how far away the player is from the texture
again will depend on how high a resolution
a texture will be displayed to the user. Now this is a technical marvel and it does
allow for
frankly some of the most stunning graphics you are ever going to see on a first-person
shooter.
However it also creates some
unwanted artefacts let's say. For instance you may have seen in some of the videos
floating around the web that
if you turn round too quickly in New Order, Wolfenstein New Order
what you'll find is a kind of blurriness to the textures for a fraction of a second and then
suddenly they'll kind of pop and
render properly and in Rage it was very badly pronounced. It
essentially made the game look atrocious. In Wolfenstein New Order
it's still present but is in no way as gnarly as it used to be in Rage.
Overall the gameplay that we're kind of seeing here is absolutely
classic first-person shooter action. It's fast it's
furious. It's completely over the top in the way we want from Wolfenstein,
and it's backed up with beautiful looking graphics. There has been some
complaints regarding the way ammo and health pickups
and armour pick-ups work but from my perspective, I really like it.
It's so old school and it makes you think. It changes the dynamic
of each fight from a point of view of health, armour and
ammo conservation as well as having to well, run-in and pick
up that ammo when you're starting to run low and you'll have to change positions
within the environment to obviously make sure that you're
avoiding incoming fire, meting out some outgoing damage
but also then able to go round and pick up all those pick-ups so, well,
you're not going to get painted into a corner with absolutely no ammo and only a knife to
defend yourself with.
Now special mention has to be made for some of the bosses and bad guys they've got in this
game because
not only are they beautifully detailed but they are gnarly.
I mean real first-person shooter balls to the wall
action. This is just beautifully done.
Now one of the things I quite like with
all games really is a great story. Now the story here with Wolfenstein New Order
could be best described as Last Action Hero mixed with a little bit of Expendables
and a healthy dose of Mission Impossible thrown in. It's absolutely
over the top and it honestly makes Call of Duty
look like a playground story. This game
really does want you to feel like you are a man against the world
and you are literally going to be jumping from aircraft, scaling the side of
buildings and avoiding some of the biggest explosions you will ever see in a
computer game.
It's wonderfully well realised. This may very well be the Wolfenstein game
we never deserve to have. It's that
beautifully detailed and so lavishly well supported by its developers.
However, and this is the big but unfortunately with Wolfenstein New Order
on PC the game is frankly a technical mess
as it stands today. The main issues really come from at the present
GPU issues with drivers for NVIDIA and AMD.
At the moment we're having to do an awful lot of technical work arounds to
try and get the game running
in any kind of decent state. Now it has to be said that on NVIDIA's GPUs things are an
awful lot better. We actually found ironically enough that
we were able to get 60 frames a second out of our mid-range
gaming PC where our high-performance gaming PC which has an AMD chip in it
is struggling. So our NVIDIA 560 is
able to deliver 60 frames a second with pretty much everything turned on
on, well, a 2.3 GHz processor
from AMD, an F1 at that,
which is not particularly great for gaming I must say. It's very much a gaming CPU
you're constrained when you're playing games on it
with a gig of RAM and a standard platter base spinning hard drive.
Yet it's getting 60 frames a second. Compare that to
an AMD 7950 GPU with a 30%
core boost on the clock and about 20% clock boost on the memory
and it barely hits 40 frames a second and it's completely unstable all of the
time. It's bizarre. Now
it doesn't seem to matter which manufacturer you go with. Some people are
finding that
they could have identical AMD or NVIDIA set-ups
and on one NVIDIA machine the game is fine,
on another NVIDIA machine it's an absolute mess. So something is really
going on here and in
part I think it comes down to the ID Tech 5 engine.
It is open GL and generally speaking these days we don't see a lot
of AAA Open GL games. Because of that
the graphics card manufacturers really have not been putting a lot of love
into supporting Open GL on their cards and I think that might be part of what
we're having here. Certainly
on the AMD side of things they are well known for having lousy Open GL
support
and potentially incompetent developers working within AMD
actually delivering the support to developers for
Open GL on their cards. Certainly some of the conversations I've been having with
games developers
over the last 24 hours seems to suggest that a lot of the blame is being placed
on AMD.
Certainly the problems that this game is having on AMD hardware
does seem to be down to AMD and not so much down to the game's developer.
NVIDIA on the other hand seems to be having lots of problems with its drivers
some drivers are working fine, others are not and likewise you're having to go in and turn off
tessellation, fiddle around with anti-aliasing and so on and
generally muck around the game settings to try and get this thing actually
running stable
and nice. Now it has to be said. NVIDIA are suffering fewer problems than AMD are
but right now well, if you're in the market for this game
just be a little bit cautious because right now
we are waiting for patches either for the game or new drivers.
One way or the other this thing is going to require some work before
personally I could give you a go and buy this it's brilliant
rating. Right now it is a brilliant game.
It's shaping up to be an absolute stonker of a AAA title. I mean
one of those first person shooters we'll be talking about in another 10 years'
time.
But those technical limitations on PC right now
are really marking its card as far as I'm concerned. We can have the best game in
the world but
if people can't play it, it's not really a very good game is it?