Wolfenstein: The New Order, it’s fair to say, was a pretty solid hit. Not Watch Dogs levels of insane sales, perhaps, but successful enough that it could possibly warrant a sequel.
Something that creative director Jens Matthies, speaking to Giant Bomb, says the team at Machine Games ”would love to do”.
Asked about a possible follow-up to the alternate universe Nazi-blaster, Matthies said “We would love to do a sequel. We have a very, very clear idea of what we accomplished with this game, and what we want to accomplish with a sequel.”
Which won’t surprise anyone who’s played through the game, as the ending leaves a whole lot yet unanswered. Though Matthies knows all too well that the big-budget, long production cycle nature of triple-A video games make planning a second entry in the rebooted series a daunting prospect, despite lessons learned during the creation of The New Order.
”It’s not like it’s one lesson. You learn things constantly, and there’s no switch that you don’t want to keep trying to dial a little higher. I wouldn’t say there was…I wish there was one big lesson. It’s more like 500 smaller ones.”
”This is kind of an abstract, but because these projects are so long in terms of development—this was three-and-a-half years for this game—and given how long it takes to make a game these days, this kind of game, and whenever you design in terms of preproduction, what becomes the plan for all of those years, has to be a flawlessly polished diamond. If it isn’t, you end up paying for that further down the line. You have to react to it, change, and do stuff.
I think we were able to polish that diamond a lot more than we have ever been able to in the past, but we still have new ideas for how we can polish it even further. If there is one grand lesson, it’s probably that: to take pre-production even one step further. After the next game, it’ll be the same thing again and again.”
Have you played The New Order? Would you like to see a sequel?
