Learn all about Wolfenstein: Youngblood
With several exciting announcements at Bethesda’s E3 showcase for projects soon and distant, you may have missed the short announcement of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, the next entry in Machine Games’ grim, alternate-historical, Nazi-shooting, Hitler-kicking first-person shooters. Though it’s not much, here’s everything we know so far.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood Story
Jess and Soph Blazkowicz overlook a Nazi-overrun Paris in Da’at Yichud power armor—both will be playable in co-op, a first for Wolfenstein .
According to a short press release from Bethesda, the game will be set in Paris in “1980, 19 years after BJ Blazkowicz ignited the second American Revolution.” The players (yes, “players” plural—more on this later) will take on the roles of BJ’s twin daughters, Jess and Soph, searching for their absent father. Unsurprisingly, for both the Wolfenstein fiction and proper history, Paris will be crawling with Nazis.
Since this is the only information stated in any official releases or interviews, any more details must be speculated. For instance, there is still no word out on whether this will be in the canonical timeline of The New Order and The New Colossus or if this is an alternate universe spin-off. (Would that make this alternate-alternate-historical?) Other questions come up as well—will the Wyatt and Fergus timeline decisions affect this story at all?
Besides these meat-and-potato story questions, I am rather excited to see what the story itself will be. We’ve already seen Machine Games’ propensity for paralleling modern-day sociopolitical issues with historical conflicts in their Nazi-fied decades, and I can think of no richer playground for their interests than the very decade that incubated Donald Trump.
We should also consider how Jess and Soph’s characters will reflect on BJ as a father, just as BJ reflected on his parents. Abuse and violence, as we’ve seen, run deep in the Blazkowicz family. Did BJ learn from his father’s mistakes, or will he end up failing his children as well?
Wolfenstein: Youngblood Release Date
According to all sources, the game is due for release in 2019. There have been no significant reported layoffs at Machine Games since the completion of The New Colossus, so it’s safe to assume the core creative team is intact, including Jen Matthies, the creative director of the studio. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for a smooth production, so we can get our hands on the game soon.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood Gameplay
A soldier stands guard outside a café in a moody, propaganda-laden street in Paris.
If The New Colossus is anything to go by, Youngblood will likely be a similar dynamic mix of stealth missions and chaotic firefights. However, for the first time in Wolfenstein, there will be cooperative multiplayer for two players. Not only is this the first multiplayer of any kind in the modern iteration of the series, but there are also hints of an asynchronous system.
In the trailer, we see one sister brutally punching a wall as her workout and the other quietly crouching in the forest as she stalks a horned goat with a bolt-action sniper rifle. A clear direction for this game could be asynchronous co-op, where one sister takes a stealthy, long-ranged combat approach with rifles while the other is more of dual-automatic-shotgun wielding psychopath, running around eviscerating Nazis into unrecognizable chunks of red on the ground.
We can also look to other two-player co-op shooters for clues as to how Youngblood may be designed. This potential close vs. long-range approach is reminiscent of Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, which starred another sibling duo. In that game, Thomas McCall could get to higher ground with a rope and use long-range rifles, while Ray could kick down doors, take more damage, and generally be a six-shooting desperado. There could also be levels where the characters have to split up or one has to cover the other from long range, similar to certain moments in Resident Evil 5.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood Trailers
Aside from the hints of each sister’s gameplay role and the ending shot of Da’at Yichud power armor (will it be making a larger appearance?), the trailer mostly establishes the mood of the game: Paris—Nazis—‘80s. Every shot is drenched in this intense, unearthly red and blue reminiscent of the eye-popping lighting from ‘80s films such as Heathers or Blade Runner. The shot of Nazis marching by a flaming car, in particular, evokes Terminator post-Skynet imagery.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood Developer
Though we don’t know when development on Youngblood began, we can assume it began shortly after the release of The New Colossus, if not concurrently. Often, as games are in the final polishing phase of production—a heavy workload for programmers and QA testers but not so much for writers and designers—another project will begin in pre-production. With a 2019 release date and a title echoing the last Wolfenstein expansion, The Old Blood, this could easily be another expansion-sized project.
Machine Games was created in 2009 by founding members of Starbreeze Studios, so we must take into account that studio’s pedigree as well. Starbreeze created some of the most unique and interesting story-driven first-person shooters of their generation, such as The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness. They were particularly renowned for pushing the limits of first-person animation, visual fidelity, and storytelling—a clear through-line to modern Wolfenstein.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood News
There is not much news on the game yet, but there has been a bit of a kerfuffle regarding the existence of a Switch version of the game: GameStop took some pre-orders after the reveal, then promptly took the listing down, then Panic Button—the porting studio behind the Switch versions of Doom and The New Colossus—openly stated they would be interested in the porting work. No matter how that resolves, though, we’re certain to receive a sharp-looking PC version. (Though, let’s hope those performance oddities from The New Colossus don’t pop up again.)
Hopefully, we’ll get more news about the game soon whether it be proper gameplay footage or a specific release date.
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