The Wolfenstein series numbering scheme is a little messy. Castle Wolfenstein was the first, but the FPS series as we know it started 25 years ago with Wolfenstein 3D. Sequels and reboots led to Wolfenstein—just Wolfenstein—in 2009, after which Bethesda took over and gave us Wolfenstein: The New Order and then Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, neither of which were Wolfenstein 2, which didn't come along until last year. This year, Bethesda revealed Wolfenstein: Youngblood at E3, which in keeping with that complicated tradition is not Wolfenstein 3 but rather a standalone spin-off. 

A proper Wolfenstein 3 is on the way, however, although you probably don't want to start holding your breath waiting for it just yet. "Absolutely we’re making a Wolfenstein 3," Pete Hines, Bethesda's vice president of PR and marketing, said in an interview with Metro. "They said on stage [at E3] that they’re taking a break from the larger story to do this thing. But we all have to see how that ends." 

Hines also said that dire stories of Wolfenstein 2's poor sales performance were a little overblown. "At the end of the day Wolfenstein did well for us, because we're about to do two more Wolfenstein games," he said. "Could it have done better? Sure. But…"   

He made a similar commitment to the future of other single-player Bethesda games, such as Prey and Dishonored, which according to some reports also failed to meet expectations. But Hines pointed out that more Prey DLC is on the way, and cautioned against reading too much into the statement that the Dishonored series is "resting." 

"Look, Arkane has two studios, they’re working on a number of things. That’s no different than Todd Howard saying, ‘I’m gonna make a Fallout game and then I’m gonna make Starfield before I go back to TES6’," Hines said. "He didn’t say I’m never making another… there’s like, 'We have an idea for another thing here, we have an idea for another there'." 

"We are a business, we are trying to make money so we’re doing things that we think are smart. We’re doing things we think people will want and will be successful. And it’s gonna continue to be a mix." 

Wolfenstein: Youngblood, set in Paris in the early 1980s following the disappearance of BJ Blazkowicz, is expected to be out in 2019. Wolfenstein 3 hasn't actually been officially announced yet, and so we'll just have to wait patiently until Walmart Canada does us a solid. 

The weekend is almost here and while Devolver Digital's typically indie ensemble is on sale via Steam this weekend, so too are both the Call of Duty and Wolfenstein series—new games and old alike. 

On the COD front, Infinite Warfare, Black Ops 3, and Advanced Warfare are all going for £19.99/$29.99 at 50 percent off, while 2008's World at War comes in at £9.99/$9.99.  The COD Black Ops Bundle is probably where you'll make your biggest savings—down from £59.99/$79.99 to £29.99/$39.99—however it's cool to see the game that started it all in 2006 on the list for £7.49/$9.99 too.  

Wolfenstein-wise, it's a similar gig. 2014's The New Order is subject to a 70 percent sale, now selling for £4.49/$5.99, as it its 2015 prequel The Old Blood. If you fancy taking on some '90s-inspired Nazis, the 15-year old series original is on there too—going for £0.89/$1.49, which I reckon is worth it for nostalgia's sake alone. 

Speaking to The New Order, Chris said this in his 2014 review: 

"[Wolfenstein: The New Order's] writing, music and environmental art all achieve far more than you might expect from the game about a preternaturally durable testicle with a revenge fetish and a gun in each hand. In a genre that is often overtaken by derivative or exploitative games, it's a pleasant surprise—a reminder of a time when a shooter's singleplayer campaign was the main event. A time when these games were made with attention to detail, care, and a bit of love."

Head in this direction for the Call of Duty Franchise Steam sale, and this-a-way for the platform's Wolfenstein Franchise sale. Both are running now through Monday 6pm BST/10am PST. 

This week on the Mod Roundup, a mod lets you uncap your FPS and removes FOV limits for id Tech 5 games such as Rage, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. Plus, a new release of The Dark Mod arrives with a level editor, an introductory mission, and other goodies. Finally, a Fallout 4 mod lets you rename just about any item you like.

Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.

id5 Tweaker

Download link

This mod for id Tech 5 games does a lot of nifty things—in particular, it lets you change the FPS limit in games like Wolfenstein: The New Order and Rage. You can also widen your FOV, rebind any action to any key and disable the minimap (in Rage), and it also bundles various config files into a single file. There's a lot of commands to learn and installation instructions here, so read carefully.

The Dark Mod 2.05

Download link

The Dark Mod, originally a Thief-inspired mod for Doom 3 (now a free standalone game) has been around since 2009 and won our award for Mod of the Year in 2013. And it's still being improved! The latest release includes a level editor and the first of three planned story missions. There are also some performance increases and new assets. Note: old saves are not compatible with the new version, so if you upgrade you'll lose your progress.

Rename Anything, for Fallout 4

Download link

This mod simply does what it says: it gives you the ability to rename Fallout 4's items directly from your Pip-Boy menu. Weapons, notes, clothing, keys, holotapes—you name it, you can rename it. This makes finding your favorite items much easier, and the vanilla 26-character limit has been removed so you can make names as long as you like. Requires the Fallout 4 Script Extender.

They don't make them like they used to. This is a sentiment that haunts modern mainstream games, particularly shooters, particularly for hobbyist and value-conscious players who have seen PC gaming change in a million ways over the course of the last decade. The FPS, the most mainstream gaming proposition that exists outside of a browser window or touchscreen, has been at the forefront of a series of sudden evolutionary shifts.

Shooters have always been popular, but their popularity was traditionally highest among people who play a lot of videogames. Players willing to invest in powerful PCs were the target audience for the most technologically ambitious games of the nineties or early noughties: those who would buy dedicated graphics cards to get the most out of Half-Life or later Crysis, who would spend big on broadband in the years before the mass acceptance of the tech to improve their performance in Quake or Tribes.

This was the hobbyist genre, in that sense and many more. Studios like Splash Damage were born out of modding teams that themselves were given life by developer tools shipped with first person shooters. Storytellers cut their teeth on immersive sims that permitted newly cinematic modes of expression, establishing principles both technological and narratological that would branch out to touch everything from Modern Warfare to Alien: Isolation and Gone Home.

The smaller, more specialist audience of that time imposed mutually agreed-upon standards on developers and publishers: games were expensive physical boxes expected to contain stories, multiplayer, tools, LAN supports, bots, and so on. Proportions varied, of course, but these were the expectations and that was the genre. Until suddenly it wasn't; until Call of Duty led the shooter's explosive charge into the cultural mainstream.

Fast forward almost ten years and shooters exist in tiered strata not unlike pop music or movies or young adult novels. Call of Duty and to a lesser extent Battlefield have achieved a level of cultural penetration equal only to FIFA, Madden, handheld and browser games and to an extent their achievement is more impressive because they do not have the broad recognisability of traditional sport nor the vast userbase of mobile phones to draw upon. They have achieved that peculiar degree of popularity where for many people they simply are. You've got your PlayStation for Netflix and each year you buy the new Call of Duty because your friends are playing it. It might be good this time or it might not, but you complain about it like you'd complain about the weather.

Children rush home and demand it from their parents because everyone else at school is playing it. It becomes the only game that those parents consider because it's the only thing that their children are talking about it. When the store attendant lets them know that they're also going to need a season pass and some Infinite Warfare controller stickers and some vouchers for in-game currency they reach into their pockets because the last thing was Avengers (again) and the next thing is going to be Star Wars (again) and that's just what it is to provide and consume entertainment in 2016.

That is what growth from subculture to mainstream looks like what it has always looked like and the anxiety that this has caused among enthusiast game-players is not unique to them. Publishers have discovered that they can offer far less for far more as long as they spend enough on marketing. And that complaint they don't make them like they used to starts to seem a little trite, because of course they don't. If you were an executive at EA, and you knew that you could charge $130 for a version of Battlefield 1 that includes all future maps and modes updates players used to expect for free and a load of skins changes players used to expect to be able to make for themselves why wouldn't you? They'd be insane to do anything else.

Except, of course, that they have. Besides its quality, this is what I found most surprising about Titanfall 2: not only was it released in close proximity to Battlefield 1, by the same publisher as Battlefield 1, but it has a totally different attitude towards its players. Respawn made one like they used to: a well-crafted singleplayer attached to imaginative multiplayer, a game that openly takes cues from Half-Life, Quake and Tribes as well as Call of Duty. And then they released it without a season pass, even without microtransactions (though there's lots of room for those to come later.)

Were it less prohibitively expensive and not bound to Origin then they'd have completely nailed it. But even so, Titanfall 2 marks an unexpected shift in the otherwise grim trajectory of this part of the games industry, a gamble on quality and generosity in what often feels like an age of efficiency and paucity.

This is notable for EA, but not without precedent elsewhere in the industry. Rainbow 6: Siege was an oddity for Ubisoft, a company that seemed to have invested itself wholesale in the production of annualised open worlds but made an exception to produce one of the year's best and smartest tactical multiplayer shooters. Similarly Bethesda, which has successfully supported talent at id, Arkane and Machine Games and in doing so profited from the critical acclaim bestowed upon Doom, Dishonored, and Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Seen in this light, EA's totally divergent strategies for its two shooters seems less erroneous. What I think we're seeing is the waning influence of the Call of Duty bandwagon. That particular ship hasn't just sailed: like the photogenic twenty-somethings in Infinite Warfare's cringeworthy TV spot, it has rocketed off into space. You can't beat Call of Duty or Battlefield by mimicking their business models: in fact, without the degree of mainstream acceptance that lets them get away with it, doing so is a good way to kill a game. Just ask Evolve hell, ask Titanfall 1.

It makes more sense to build something good and try to foster goodwill around it and to foster development talent, too. As people who care about these games (or care enough to complain about the way things are, at least) this provides a reason to be optimistic. Battlefield happens to be good this year, as Call of Duty may well prove to be. But there's going to be no changing the nature or the borderline-exploitative value proposition they present to prospective players. Until the public gets bored of them, they're not going to change.

It is time to start worrying less about how the sales of games like Titanfall 2 match up against the genre giants that they can't hope to usurp, and to start appreciating that we've entered an era where an alternative approach is being experimented with. If you bemoan the rise of pre-order bonuses, microtransactions and season passes, do not buy them just because. If you're going to invest yourself in mainstream games, choose the ones that meet your standards and respect your expectations. If your complaint is that they do not make these games like they used to, then it is on you to show up when they do.

At this year's E3, Bethesda Softworks very quietly teased a new Wolfenstein game. A screen of a DOS-style directory that kicked off the studio's pre-E3 conference listed the three Wolfenstein titles relevant to Bethesda's run with the game Wolf3D, The New Order, and The Old Blood and a fourth, New Colossus, which of course nobody had ever heard of. New Colossus is the title of the famous poem that reads, in part, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free," that hero BJ Blazkowicz quotes during the game's tear-jerking close.

It was an obvious Wolfenstein tease that ended in frustration: Nothing else happened. Bethesda said nada about a sequel, and in fact didn't even acknowledge the presence of the tease at all. The whole thing blew over, largely unnoticed and quickly forgotten. But Blazkowicz voice actor Brian Bloom brought it up again in a recent interview with Two Left Sticks, in which he was very careful to not say that Bethesda is not not working on a new Wolfenstein game, and may not in fact already be not doing that right at this very moment.

"I ll be safe with this answer. If you look at Bethesda s E3 2016 lineup there was a title hinted at in a cool way. It sparked a bit of wildfire. That subtle, very simple DOS language, going through the titles. Perhaps we re working on that as we speak," he said, not hugely subtley. He also hinted rather strongly that Blazkowicz's tale is not yet concluded. "Whoever BJ Blazkowicz was, in the content we have so far, he s the articulation of a promise not kept; a country that surrendered while he was in a coma. He s fighting a war on his own with a very small group of people, completely outgunned and out-manned. A world taken over by the scourge of racism, nazism, and fascism."

Wolfenstein: The New Order is probably the best Wolfenstein game to come along since the original, and BJ Blazkowicz is the ultimate FPS archetype the well from which all subsequent gun-toting meatheads has sprung. So some future Wolfenstein sequel is very much a "yes, obviously" sort of thing. Even so, it's nice to hear, even unofficially, that it's actually happening, and Bloom's thoughtfulness about the character and the world in which he lives gives me hope that maybe it can be as smart and moving (yes, seriously) as the game that brought him back.

Thanks, Shacknews.

Alicja Bachleda-Curu , who voiced Wolfenstein: The New Order's Anya, has suggested there's a new Wolfestein game in the works. Speaking to Polish TV station TVN, she revealed that they were "making a second one"—you'll find the full quote, as translated by Eurogamer Poland, below.

"I'm working on a video game, first part of which I have already made. Now we're making a second one, which will take two more years.

"I played this game as a child. I was very happy when I got to the point where I could shoot Hitler."

Developer MachineGames, and publisher Bethesda, haven't yet confirmed a New Order sequel, although creative director Jen Mathies did say they had lots of ideas last year.

Chris Thursten liked The New Order quite a bit, though he was less keen on its standalone expansion The Old Blood. (Thanks, Eurogamer.)

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is out. We just received a copy of MachineGames' follow-up to The New Order Monday evening and we re working hard to get our review to you. In the interlude between now and then, I took a moment to ask Arcade Berg (who may have the most appropriate name in the game industry) at MachineGames a few questions about how they approached the standalone prequel.

PCG: How have players' expectations for single-player FPSes changed over the past five years or so? What makes a great single-player FPS in 2015?

Arcade Berg, senior game designer: All types of gamers want good games. Being a FPS fan has been great because of the popularity of the genre, which in turn makes for many games but all that choice also means that players have to be picky because they can t always play everything. That s where I think successful games come in—with enough quality that people feel it s worth their investment. In the end, that s all there is too it.

To me, The New Order's success as a game doesn't stem from the fact that it tried to reinvent the wheel—it's still a game with turret sequences, item pickups, stealth sequences, and other FPS touchstones. At the outset of the project, what would you say were the big points of focus?

AB: Of course, development is an organic process with a lot of changes along the way, but I think we had a pretty clear idea on what we wanted to do from the start. We wanted an FPS with a really solid core and a very relatable and immersive narrative that would drive you from the start to the end.

If I had to say, I think the biggest things we focused on were the core mechanics and making sure the story was intertwined with the actual game and not just slapped on top and we also wanted to embrace and carry forward what Wolfenstein is to us and hopefully to the fans.

We also knew we wanted the game to run in 60fps. It makes a big difference and it s a huge undertaking tech-wise to make it work if you want high fidelity. It took a lot of work, but it s worth it.

What's MachineGames' approach to weapon design?

AB: More than anything, our approach involves persistent iteration with continuous and constant testing and tweaking to get it just right. It s all about the user experience -- how it feels to use and the response you get when hitting (or missing, if you re one of those) a bad dude or even any surface.

At MachineGames, we encourage people to bring their expertise as much as possible so we get animations that really convey the weight of the weapon and the audio is super satisfactory. There s no here s how we do it, it s really just a long process of craftsmanship from everyone on the team and lots of tweaking until the game launches.

How do you make Nazis, one of the most "popular" enemies/characters in FPSes, interesting to encounter?

AB: By making them more than a symbol. I don t think it s solely the fact that they re Nazis that makes them fun to shoot—though it does help! They could be cowboys, surfers or Vikings.

What s important is their presence and the player-interaction with them. The way they take cover, how they try and evade grenades, how they try and flank you, how they react when hurt and how they stay away from dangerous areas. We try and make them less one-dimensional and have spent so, so much energy on their AI and behaviors. It has stay interesting even if you re encountering the same type of baddies over and over. To achieve that, we make them versatile enough to be able to react to situations differently, so it s never quite the same depending on the environment you re in and what the player does.

The Old Blood is way more pulp than The New Order.

How can we expect the Nazis' fascination with the occult to be expressed in The Old Blood?

AB: There are many parallel layers of that in the game, and players will find varying degrees of it depending on how much attention they pay. There will be the obvious big pieces in the story, but there s so much more if you start listening to soldiers conversations, reading the various articles and letters lying around, and just looking around the environment. There are bits and pieces everywhere throughout the game for those who are attentive.

A lot of people commented on the "Tarantino" quality of The New Order. How do you feel about that comparison, and is it something we'll see expressed in The Old Blood?

AB: Every time we hear those kinds of comparisons it s as a good thing, so we ll gladly take the compliment. While we haven t strived to make something Tarantino-ish, I can see what they re talking about. More than anything, The Old Blood is way more pulp than The New Order, something you ve probably seen with the trailer and marketing material as well. You ll definitely feel that old b-movie style when playing the game.

Other than the setting, what did you want to do in The New Order that you couldn't, but that you've put into The Old Blood?

AB: Put a big heavy pipe in the hands of Blazkowicz!

The  nightmare Easter egg was such a success and positively received by the fans, so there will be more of that in The Old Blood.

The biggest addition, however, must be our completely new Challenge game mode in which you can replay some of the best combat scenarios from the main campaign for score. Each scenario comes with online leaderboards so you can finally settle on who the best Wolfenstein-player around is!

MachineGames and publisher Bethesda have not been shy showing off Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. We've already seen heaps of footage, but now there's another lengthy video showcasing the standalone expansion. The game releases this week so it might be worth avoiding this if you're keen to be surprised, but if you're impatient or just wanna watch the world burn, the video is above. 

Reported to have a more "pulpy, B-movie vibe" than its serious older sibling The New Order, The Old Blood will take place across eight chapters, and is expected to be punishingly difficult on its hardest setting (a redundant observation for anyone brave enough to play The New Order on its hardest difficulty). It's due to release on May 6 and will require similar system specs to The New Order. 

Cheers, VG247.

I don't really have any anecdotes from Wolfenstein: The New Order. An anecdote suggests specifics: a place, a time, an action. What I have is a sort of Wolfenstein super-anecdote—an amalgam of overlapping actions merged into a after-image of specific violence that exists independent of setting.

It goes like this: There is a large room filled with guards. I silently approach, crouch-walking my way to the first target. This is not a careful or studied action. It's deliberate. Confident.

Guard #1 has his back to me. Then there is a knife in it.

This is when things get blurry, as the individual parts of the layered memory diverge. Maybe a second guard is quickly dispatched. Maybe a third. Maybe there's a dog. Always, inevitably, I'll be spotted, and things come back into focus.

Wolfenstein doesn't let you go loud; it lets you go deafening. Its stealth systems are robust and satisfying, but its firefights are absurd. Shotgun. Twin shotguns. Twin assault rifles. Big laser-gun thing. Assault rifles fire rockets. Sniper rifles fire fully automatic lasers. Shotguns fire chunks of metal that bounce on every surface. 

This is fucking Video Games, son. Capital-V. Capital-G.

Assault rifles should be boring. Valve supposedly kept them out of Team Fortress 2 because holding the mouse cursor over another player while bullets chip away at their health isn't interesting. Wolfenstein solves this by letting me sprint at an enemy while holding both mouse buttons—obliterating them in a cacophony of pumping lead.

There's a tendency for games in the modern-military-shooter subgenre to include guns simply because they exist. I've played numerous Battlefields and Call of Duties and I still barely know the difference between M16A1 and an M4A1. Granularity strips a game's weapons of their personality, because what makes them unique is unremarkable.

In Wolfenstein, I feel like an extension of the gun because I know what that gun is about. Not what it can do, but what it is. A fully upgraded Laserkraftwerk is not a laser rifle. It's a statement—one that closes with multiple exclamation marks. A charged scope shot disintegrates an enemy. Solid form becomes a fine blood mist.

If phase one of my amalgadote is stealth and phase two is action, phase three is recovery. Again, The New Order functions as a breath of fresh air blowing away years of accepted shooter design. The problem with regenerating health is it naturally breeds caution. If I'm near death, I'll take cover. I'll retreat. In Wolfenstein, if I retreat, I die. The areas behind me were picked clean by obsessive collecting. If I need health, I push forward or around—circumventing the remaining enemies in a burst of speed and a slide into temporary safety.

Health? Armour? Dog food? Find it, grab it, and keep shooting.

It's the fluidity of all this that makes The New Order exhilarating. In stealth games, I quickload when I'm spotted. In shooters, I'm cautious when pushing forward. In Wolfenstein, I'm bouncing between tempos—sending rockets into a big metal robo-man, sprinting into a corridor, grabbing ammo, obliterating a heavy with the LKW, and, finally, unloading twin shotguns into whatever has the sheer audacity to still be moving. I love this. Who wouldn't?

I d been going through a dry patch when this came along. No game seemed to quite have that special spark to make me want to commit to it. So I didn t commit to anything, and got on with some gardening instead.

Then I saw my first trailer for Wolfenstein: The New Order, and knew I was looking at the next game I was going to play.

At the time, this bullets-and-boilerplate industrial Nazi shooter just seemed to offer an easy way back in. Lots of mindless carnage and muzzle-flash, but with an interesting aesthetic. Lumbering steampunk stormtroopers and fascist robo-dogs against a brutalist alternate-1960s backdrop, and a banging rock soundtrack that probably wouldn t be in the game anyway.

The New Order didn t disappoint, but it did confound my expectations.

The carnage was mindless, I ll give you that. I d say that you hit the ground running, except that actually you hit the fuselage running, because you haven t even set foot on the ground before you ve jumped out of a plane over the North Atlantic to land on another goddamn plane. Explosions! Giant robots! More explosions! If the whole game had been set in the bullet-filled, castle-storming world of that prologue, I would have had a perfectly good time.

Yet already there were hints of something a little more interesting going on. Did you notice that when Fergus saved you from slipping off the plane, the game seemed to linger for a moment on the act of him and Wyatt hauling you up to safety? Did you notice how that action was then oddly repeated at certain points in the game?

Leitmotiv—such a lovely German word, don t you think?

BJ was different too. No longer the emotionless, soulless killing machine of previous games, he expressed regret for a life unlived, compassion for fallen comrades. In a calculated up-yours to continuity, he didn t even look like the dark-haired BJ of the last Wolfenstein. MachineGames went right back to the fair-haired, implausibly square-headed BJ of the original—and made him human and likeable. He s the big, corn-fed college quarterback you want on your side, who takes the time to teach the panicking new recruit a trick to control his fear. Inhale, count to four, exhale. All there is to it. When was the last time you saw a tough-guy protagonist in a shooter who was human enough to even need a way to control his fear, let alone admit to it? Inhale, count to four, of course, becomes another recurring phrase.

It was the little touches I noticed most. The cheery crooked grin on the face of cliched Nazi supervillain General Deathshead. The old boy s so upbeat, so amused by life! Right now, he s amused because you ve somehow managed to break into his impregnable castle only to lock yourself in his giant trash compactor. What are you people doing in there?

Wolfenstein: The New Order, it turns out, is going to have fun with the format. It s going to be smarter, more inventive and sillier with the franchise than it even occurred to any previous developer to be. Not Raven, not Splash Damage. Certainly not id Software. You re going to watch the best part of fifteen years pass in a single time-lapse panning shot across a sanitorium day-room, because the developers thought that would be a cool thing to do. Later a uniformed harridan will show you some photographs on a train, and you ll fly to the moon.

I m not holding The New Order up as some kind of Academy Award eligible masterpiece here. BJ s internal monologues are pretty risible. But equally, don t let that blind you to what MachineGames have achieved. Even to consider giving an inner life to a man whose name is essentially Blowjob McBlastobits is an act of sheer game development heroism.

In Wolfenstein, MachineGames inherited PC gaming s oldest, most juvenile and unevolved premise: the big shooty man who kills Nazis. They had the guts and the vision to do something new with that, when everybody else played it safe. I d love to see what they did with Duke Nukem.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.