Wolfenstein The New Order Preview GameGPU

Release date: 23 May 2014 of the year 
Genre: First Person Shooter, FPS
developer: MachineGames
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a first-person shooter, the ninth game in the Wolfenstein series, developed by the Swedish company MachineGames, announced on May 7, 2013 on GameSpot, the game is published by Bethesda Softworks and is scheduled for release on May 23, 2014. The game engine Id Tech 5 from Id Software is used for development.

Wolfenstein is a series of shooters that has long won the hearts of gamers with its entertaining gameplay and good plot, moreover, this is not just a game in which you have to exterminate Nazis in droves, it also has to look beyond the boundaries of reality, as well as use magic, which is an integral part gameplay. All this, coupled with the deep atmosphere of the project, will never leave any fan of high-quality action indifferent.

In such a nostalgic environment, you will have to spend a little time, shooting all the enemies and wandering through secret fascist laboratories, Blazkovich is captured. While trying to escape, what comes into his head is not a great idea, but a metal shard, and our hero is sent to drool within the walls of a small Polish psychiatric hospital, where a nurse named Anna takes care of him.

In general, this goes on year after year for 20 years. The surroundings change, the beds and roommates change, who immediately go somewhere with the Nazis. During one of these visits, the “winners” try to drag nurse Anya away with them. Here our agent turns on the hero and Blazkovich plunges a scalpel into the neck of the nearest fascist and for the first time in 20 years of his vegetative state rises to his feet. Actually, this is how the prologue ends and the main part of the game begins.

The gameplay experience of the main part is almost the same as the retro prologue: Wolfenstein: The New Order is an old-fashioned linear shooter with an unlimited number of weapons, switches on the walls and some other bottles that need to be collected to replenish the stamina bar. And what’s most surprising is that this does not cause irritation, but rather genuine childish joy, because the “old-fashioned” nature of the game is purely external.

Despite the sometimes overly convoluted corridors and general artlessness, killing fascists in The New Order is incredibly fun. All weapons look and feel just right to make you want to use them as often as possible. This is despite the fact that the game often gives you the opportunity to sneak up on enemies with just a knife. Perhaps stealth will still be useful for battles with really strong enemies, like walking robots with machine guns, but in the demo version presented at Gamescom, all problems were solved by continuous fire from two machine guns. When this was not enough, a multi-barrel machine gun removed from its stand fell into the hands of the hero - in the best traditions of Wolfenstein.

Enemies from such dense fire are covered with deep wounds and fly off to the wall, columns crumble into small pieces, and wooden cladding and glass turn into dust underfoot. A similar, almost tactile pleasure from shooting was in all the old id Software shooters, starting from the first Wolfenstein and Doom, but the current game only uses the engine of the founding fathers: id Tech 5. Rage and the future horror game The Evil Within, about which we wrote in our report from E3.

It's hard to say that Wolfenstein: New Order looks particularly good for a game that's also coming out on the powerful PS4 and Xbox One. The game's characters clearly lack smoother animations and liveliness to their faces, but the game makes up for it with stunning designs. In it, the employees of the Swedish Machine Games, who once created The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness, are traditionally strong.

Wolfenstein: The New Order uses a cross-platform engine, which in turn will allow it to work on different platforms without rewriting the code for each platform separately. Support for all major platforms has been announced so far PC, Mac, Linux and next-generation consoles Playstation 4, Xbox One. Presumably, the game will also be compatible with all major systems of the Microsoft family Windows discharge systems 32-bit or 64-bit, that before UNIX such systems cannot be said with firm certainty about porting, but the possibility is not rejected. As a graphic API Wolfenstein: The New Order will use Open and cross-platform OpenGL, not Direct3D 10.

 The heart of Wolfenstein: The New Order is id Tech 5, a game engine developed and improved by id Software. id Tech 5 is the fifth engine in the id Tech series and is cross-platform software designed for use on personal computers, Macintosh computers and Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 game consoles. The name of the engine - id Tech 5 - follows the new notation adopted by id Software. This diagram, unlike the previous one, provides information about the generation of the engine (for example, the "Doom 3 engine" is now called "id Tech 4"). The id Tech 5 engine is also used in games: Rage, Doom 4, The Evil Within.

id Tech 5 was first officially announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which was held in San Francisco on June 11, 2007. The demo took place on an eight-core Apple Macintosh computer, however the demo used only one core and a single-threaded implementation of the OpenGL API. The video card used was a Quadro 7000 with 512 MB of video memory.

At E3 2007, which took place from July 11 to July 13, 2007 in Santa Monica, California, the engine was shown to potential licensors, but not to the public. The first real public demonstration took place at QuakeCon 2007 during the annual keynote hosted by John Carmack himself. It was then announced that id Tech 5 would be used in id Software's new game in development, Rage, which was based on an entirely new IP.

At QuakeCon 2007, John Carmack, lead game engine developer at id Software, told LinuxGames that he was committed to minimizing the use of third-party commercial technologies in the engine that would ultimately prevent the engine from being made open source. Therefore, the source code for id Tech 5 will eventually be released, just like its predecessors.

The engine demo featured approximately 20 GB of texture data and a fully dynamic, fluid world. The engine uses advanced MegaTexture technology, which uses textures with a resolution of up to 128 × 000 pixels (128 times larger than the last version of id Tech 000, which used a 16 × 4 pixel texture). One of the features of the renderer will be the use of penumbra when shading, which will be achieved using shadow maps. This is unlike the id Tech 32 engine's shading method, where shadows are produced with very sharp edges.

The engine will likely feature many other graphical effects, such as different lighting materials, high dynamic range work, and motion blur. The engine will also support multi-threaded processing on a multi-core CPU. Rendering, game logic, artificial intelligence, physics engine and sound engine will be executed both in parallel and through separate data streams.

Below we publish the actual gameplay video from the official website of Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Based on the above material, we will draw some conclusions. Since the game is based on the id Tech 5 engine, we can conclude that it will not be very resource-consuming and, by modern standards, not very demanding. Apparently, for a comfortable game you will need at least four computing threads. Also, for the game to run smoothly, it will require about 3 or 4 gigabytes of RAM in the system.

Well, if we think about the graphics subsystem that will be needed for Wolfenstein The New Order, then in our opinion, sufficient performance will be provided by video cards starting from the level of NVidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti or AMD Radeon R9 270. Optimal performance, taking into account all the maximum settings activated, can be expected from NVidia GeForce GTX 770 or AMD Radeon R9 280X.