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Wolfenstein 3 Can’t Pull Its Punches Like Youngblood

Wolfenstein 3 Can’t Pull Its Punches Like Youngblood https://ift.tt/7tHpgnq Wolfenstein: Youngblood was one sour batch of sauerkraut. Marinated in a noxious and ill-fitting live-service-adjacent brine, this troubled spin-off (and the mediocre virtual reality title it launched alongside) left a bad taste that has lingered for almost seven years. Developer MachineGames’ adventures with another famous Nazi-killer and increasingly longer AAA development cycles have meant Youngblood’s aftertaste has stuck around longer than it should have. This drought is reportedly almost over, though, since reports forecast the streets will once again run red with Nazi blood sometime soon in a new Wolfenstein game, further backing up light teases from the MachineGames team itself. There’s a lot riding on Wolfenstein 3: a game that has to meet the moment in more ways than one--and can’t follow in Youngblood’s footsteps. Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the fourth entry in MachineGames’ alt-history Wolfenst...
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How Borderlands Ensures Character-Driven Storytelling Remains A Focus 14 Years Later

How Borderlands Ensures Character-Driven Storytelling Remains A Focus 14 Years Later https://ift.tt/GvgXNM4

The Borderlands franchise holds a peculiar place within the history of the gaming industry, kickstarting a genre that has gone on to become a different kind of beast. After all, though the concept of combining both RPG and first-person shooter mechanics was first seen in 2007's Hellgate: London, the loot-shooter genre owes its popularity to 2009's Borderlands. And yet, today, many of the most popular loot-shooters are also live-service games (like Destiny 2 and Warframe). Borderlands is not, having never adopted that format. It instead has multiple sequels--some of which diverge from the original game and don't feature any looting or shooting.

Like these other live-service game franchises, however, character-driven storytelling has been one of the main unifying pillars of Borderlands, which has been supported by a writer's room. "Gearbox is casually unique in the sense that we maintain a writer's room," Gearbox Entertainment associate director of narrative properties April Johnson told me. "So we don't just plunk you to work on a project and say, 'Okay, enjoy the two of you doing this--we have multiple things that we are working on, so we won't Voltron up as a full unit until later.'"

Having a constant writer's room is a strategy you usually see in story-driven live-service games where maintaining a narrative vision over multiple years--over a decade in the case of some games like Destiny--is important. It's not often seen in AAA franchises that feature several sequels and recruit a new set of writers from project to project. Gearbox Entertainment is not wholly unique in this strategy within the gaming industry, but it is a rare exception and the team points to this as one of the reasons for how the studio has managed to curate a specific narrative voice across all its projects.

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