Wolfenstein - Technical detail review

[Hobie-wan]

Ouch, HARDOCP rips it a new one (skipped past the tech stuff).

[Stark]

How do you skip past the tech stuff in this review? It seems to be solely reviewing the game based on tech. As far as I can tell it doesn't review the gameplay at all.

[isiolia]

How do you skip past the tech stuff in this review? It seems to be solely reviewing the game based on tech. As far as I can tell it doesn't review the gameplay at all.

It says in the title that it's a "performance review", so yeah, I assume the negativity is centered on the technical aspects/options rather than the game content.

[Hobie-wan]

Ok sorry, I meant skipping by the framerate performance stuff. But that summary page still mentions issues with pop in and texture silliness even if you're ignoring settings. So no isn't a gameplay review. Adjusted thread title.

[Stark]

Gotcha. Yeah it's frustrating that they didn't learn anything from the launch of RAGE at all. Tons of flickering and oddities in that one at launch. Seems like they patched a bunch of that in within a month, not sure why it didn't ship with it that way though.

[MrPopo]

I want to go down their list of points, because some if it is coming off as dumb whining (and remember, I'm PC first).

60 FPS Cap - Pretty sure this is an engine limitation of Rage, and regardless, the only people who are "affected" are those running a 120 Hz monitor, which is completely unnecessary. I guess I just remember when we considered 30 FPS on PC shooter X to be a playable framerate, but 60 would be your silky smooth.

No AA Options - I'll give them that, though these days it's less of a concern because at least Nvidia lets you apply AA yourself without the game needing to do it explicitly.

Graphics Options linked to VRAM Capacity - I don't necessarily see the problem; the way they describe it is that you can't set the max options if your card wouldn't run well with the max options. Then they follow it up with " All the performance, for every video card, will be close to that 60 FPS framerate cap because one cannot push the settings higher and sacrifice performance for higher in-game settings", which seems to go against their first point of wanting to be able to have all the frames. Do they want a higher max framerate or do they want the ability to make their framerate suffer?

No Aspect Ratio - I don't even understand the complaint. They're saying that you can't set an aspect ratio different from your display's ratio. What is the use case for wanting to do that? Do they want to intentionally distort their image?

Texture Pop-in - This, they mentioned, is an issue with the Rage engine. The only thing I've noticed here is once in a while I've seen character textures flicker. It's not consistent so it hasn't ruined my experience. I feel like the pop-in was a bigger issue with Rage because of how open many of the environments were; so far the Wolfenstein environments are tighter.

OpenGL - They mention it's using a 5 year old version of OpenGL. Sounds like it's again the Rage engine; the engine is 3 years old, so add in the development time and it seems that they grabbed the version of OpenGL at the time and didn't upgrade (which isn't necessarily easy to do).

And then the conclusion:

We are now five months into the year, and there has yet to be a game that seems next generation to us on the PC gaming platform. Wolfenstein: The New Order will not be evaluated further from us, nor is it worth to add to our gameplay suite. That said, I'll play through the rest of it on my own gaming time just to complete the experience and nostalgia of this series, and that's about all there is to say about this game. All of us here say save your money as the new Wolf is only suitable as a bargain bin purchase.

A.k.a., if the graphics aren't giving me a sufficient enough stiffy then it's not worth playing at all.

[isiolia]

No Aspect Ratio - I don't even understand the complaint. They're saying that you can't set an aspect ratio different from your display's ratio. What is the use case for wanting to do that? Do they want to intentionally distort their image?

I think the complaint wasn't a literal "change aspect ratio" thing, but that the game sees a 16:10 display and doesn't even offer 16:9 resolutions. Most games would, and simply leave black bars above and below if they're used ('course, plenty would just do 1080p and not offer 1920x1200/etc too).

For their purposes, it's probably to provide relevant benchmark scores for 16:9 resolutions, since those are pretty common. Other people might prefer to cut the resolution down like that to slightly boost performance in a largely invisible way, since the picture being displayed is still kind of native resolution.

[noiseredux]

I "like" your post, popo.

[dsheinem]

So how does it look/run on Xbox One/PS4?

[Hobie-wan]

Sure some of the complaints will only affect people that spent $3000 on their rig, but still being a PC game, some of the limitations are puzzling. Let me change the settings as I see fit. What if the game guesses wrong on your hardware and gimps you at setting far below what it is capable of or you're trying to play it in hardware that it doesn't fully comprehend years from now? I'm reminded of installers for older DOS games that guessed I had a Pentium 28 because it made some crazy guess on my processor speed that was an unfathomable speed over 100 Mhz or a hard drive space counter read negative due to being so large. Maybe I want to bump everything to max quality just to make a screenshot, so it doesn't matter if it's puttering under 10 FPS?

HARDOCP does graphics performance evaluations to test and rate video card performance. Game commentary is secondary in these. So yes, it isn't a game play type of article, it is a tech one.