Date:
Tuesday , September 01, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Wolfenstein Gameplay Performance and IQ

Just in case you needed some more Nazis to kill in brutal and entertaining ways, the "new" Wolfenstein is here to deliver your supernatural World War II fix! We'll check it out on a broad range of video cards from the GeForce GTX 295 down to the Radeon HD 4770. Come with us as we find out what sustenance this game has to offer our starving video cards.

Introduction

The first game to bear the Wolfenstein moniker was Castle Wolfenstein, released in 1981 by Muse Software for a variety of platforms of the day, including the venerable Commodore 64. It was followed in 1984 by its sequel, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. Both of these games were top-down stealth action/adventure games which favored a slow-paced methodical approach to the guns-blazing frenetic energy of the later first-person shooter games of the same name.

In 1992, id Software released what is widely believed to be the original first-person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D. In contrast to the Muse Software games, the id Software title preferred high-speed gunfights to the stealthy approach. Nine years later, Wolfenstein entered the hardware accelerated realm with Gray Matter’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein, then powered by id Tech 3, also known as the Quake III engine. That game was followed two years later by the free and monstrously popular Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Finally, on August 18th of 2009, Raven Software and id Software released to North America Wolfenstein.

Wolfenstein

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Wolfenstein is a first-person shooter set in 1943 in a fictional town called Isenstadt at the height of the Second World War. Our returning hero, Billy "B.J." Blazkowicz, must now stop Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (or SS) from acquiring and using an occult force known as "Nachtsonne", or Black Sun. This new Wolfenstein offers an open city (Isenstadt of course) to explore, complete with resistance factions (the Kreisau Circle and the Order of the Golden Dawn) and black market merchants to help guide him along the way, give him missions, and keep him equipped. There is a new gameplay feature, The Veil, which allows B.J. to use Nachtsonne crystals himself to get through some of the stickier situations as well as find hidden items and walk through illusory doors and walls.

Wolfenstein’s multiplayer content was developed by Endrant Studios, and features class-based multiplayer. Each class has its own Veil abilities to facilitate their individual roles, such as the healing Medic and the demolitions expert Engineer. There are three multiplayer modes: Team Deathmatch, Objective, and Stopwatch. Team Deathmatch, of course, is the old standard wherein teams of players compete to have the highest number of kills before the match expires or the kill limit is reached. In Objective mode, teams are tasked with attacking or defending the other team and Stopwatch limits the amount of time the teams are given to accomplish their objectives.

The Technology

This incarnation of Wolfenstein is powered by id Tech 4, which used to be known as the Doom 3 engine, and has also powered such games as Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Prey. This generation of id Tech was first seen powering Doom 3, which was released on August 3rd of 2004. So, while the engine has certainly been updated and modified for Wolfenstein, the underlying technology is five years old.

From a certain perspective, this engine being dated is both good and bad. The good thing is that we can reasonably conclude that Wolfenstein should run very well on modern video cards. The bad thing is that we can also reasonably expect the game to look at least a little dated by its old graphics technology. The game’s box lists the minimum system requirements as an Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz or AMD Athlon 3400+, and an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT or ATI Radeon X800. These system requirements are light indeed, so we can further reasonably assume that this game will run well on the current generation of GPUs.

Graphical updates to id Tech 4 running in DX9 for Wolfenstein include: Depth of Field, Soft Shadows, Post-Processing effects (HDR), and Havok physics. These effects are very typical for DX9 games, and should provide, at least, that familiar level of graphics in current DX9 games even though it is running on a dated engine.

The Video Cards

This evaluation will include an updated lineup of seven video cards. From NVIDIA, we have the GeForce GTX 295, the GeForce GTX 285, the GeForce GTX 275, and the GeForce GTS 250. From AMD, we have the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, the Radeon HD 4890, and the Radeon HD 4770.