Part of the game seems to be about sympathizing with the less powerful, either at a small or large scale. I can see how the developers might reply to those who felt frustrated by the early game something along the lines of: “Oh, it must really be frustrating isn’t it, to be in wheelchair for half an hour in a game you can close at any time.”
Steam allows you to display the framerate in a corner of the screen. That could help you assess what’s optimal. You can push it further than that although be mindful that the highest setting is often there to look good in screenshots rather than when played and may have severely diminishing returns.
I’m cruising along at 60FPS pretty much all the time. I don’t know why they would publish system specs that the game doesn’t really need. It basically scared me away from playing it for no reason. Thanks for giving me the push I needed to get into it.
To your first point, I think it’s a good one – man, it is frustrating trying to get around in a wheel chair, having to avoid stairs, rolling out of control down conveyor belts, and having to wait a half second to pick up the gun before can start blasting Nazis. Of course, that frustration is nothing like actually being in a wheelchair all the time, and it’s a interesting message the developers are sending.
Laziness? Wanting to play it extra safe so they don’t get blamed for marginal cases? Giving that job to the intern who doesn’t know what he’s doing?
You can usually ignore CPU and RAM requirements if you have something decent you bought in the last decade. While some games (like Cities Skylines) are CPU-heavy and VR requires everything to be ultrafast, if you have a 3GHz 4-core CPU and 8GBs of RAM, your bottleneck will be your GPU and display 99% of the time.
Steam has a generous return policy so if you find your CPU/RAM aren’t up to it after all, they’ll very likely give you your money back.
Video games have the potential to be awareness and empathy-expanding performance art. Don’t preach, don’t show, don’t tell; Enable players to learn by doing while in a safe virtual environment.
Just a point, not raised before: It’s Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.
It doesn’t really help that it’s the 3rd one in the current run of the series. New Order was great, but Old Blood was much more of an expansion pack than a full new game.
Personally I think Wolfenstein 2: TNC was by far the weakest of the series. It was ok, but I never loved it like the first two. It had more interesting variation such KKK in Nazi america, like something out of The Man in the High Castle. The game itself however, didn’t work as well for me…
The toilet humor, I reckon, is much like Grace’s over the top jivetalk, ya dig ? Yeah, it’s probably a little on the nose (a *lot *more on the nose than the sight gag in the Old Blood, when BJ is told to put his weapon in a box before an infiltration weapon - which takes half a minute because he’s got so… many… guns :). I laughed out loud for real at that one. Also at BJ’s blasé and matter-of-fact “Fuck.” as he’s tumbling out of a crashing cable car. The Old Blood was a hoot) but without those moments of levity and/or camaraderie the whole thing would be pretty fucking depressing.
Which I think is a criticism one can levy at The New Order - there’s so much raw fucking horror in that game and few real breathers outside of Max Hass being Max Hass. Dissections and babies being thrown about and civilian executions and BJ rising from a pile of Auschwitz-like corpses… it gets heavy. And sure, it makes dismembering them Nazi bastards with dual auto shottys all the more pleasant but still. Pretty somber stuff, especially if you add in BJ’s oh so cheerful little monologues.
So from what I’ve seen of it (waiting on a sale to get it, but watched about half of an LP) the levity of TNC isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But yeah, if you want grimdark and a boot on your face forever, TNO has you covered and a half.
As for the domestic abuse, I kinda liked it. I mean, I didn’t like watching it obviously, but it goes towards explaining the gigantic hard-on BJ has for bullies. Humanizes the big slab of meat a little. Plus some of his childhood memories are really sweet, which again provides a neat counterpoint to the “everything is shit and then BJ gets *another *concussion” that comes right after.
And the wheelchair, IMO, isn’t so much about empathy (although it is too I suppose), but also about the player getting *angry *at how shitty it handles - much like Blazko is frustrated at his being confined to it. Stupid fucking broken body getting in the way of murdering Nazis !
