10 Years of MachineGames: A Retrospective

[ThereAreFourNaan]

Some nice info about the studio, it’s founding, their journey and their future direction.

Obviously soon this will be an official Xbox Studio so I thought people might be particularly interested to read some of this stuff. I’ve been a big fan of MachineGames and I’ll be paying very close attention to what they’re doing over the next few years.

https://bethesda.net/en/article/3eOvBq5luTVTnQFIjGfGEc/10-years-of-machinegames-a-retrospective "Executive Producer and founding member Jerk Gustafsson looks back at a decade of MachineGames: their triumphs, trials, and how the development studio has continued to grow and innovate over the years. "

Fortunately, our breakthrough came after only a year. Our talks with Bethesda about publishing opportunities resulted in us visiting id Software for three weeks in June 2010 to study idTech and work on a game concept based on one of their IPs.

We went all in on the opportunity as Bethesda was already on the very top of our list of publishers to work with; we had previously met a few people from the Bethesda Softworks publishing team while at Starbreeze to discuss potential collaborations, and they were extremely nice and supportive. Even after all these years, we still work with them and are close friends. During those extremely hot summer weeks in Texas, we laid out the plan for what came to be Wolfenstein: The New Order.

This is the image posted from 2010 - literally all the levels of TNO mapped out with names and everything. Pretty impressive that they stuck so close to that:

That time they went to Nandos:

We’d made a plan to celebrate signing our publishing deal at a Nando’s restaurant. However, we unfortunately don’t have Nando’s in Sweden! So, we took an early flight from Stockholm to London, went to the nearest Nando’s from Heathrow airport, ate a lot, and then returned home to Sweden in the afternoon!

The design goals for The New Colossus:

The main theme of The New Colossus was “freedom”. Here is an excerpt from our game presentation deck that shows our mindset and our ambitions to have that core theme influence key aspects of the game:

They note that The New Colossus was a critical success, but still provide some lessons learned:

Looking back at New Colossus, one of my mistakes was that I was so set on transferring the injured state of the character into gameplay. B.J. was severely injured at the end of The New Order and I wanted that fragile state of his body to be reflected in the health system, which resulted in the design of limited health during the first half of the game up until B.J. got his new body, which then brought the player back to full health. This provided game balancing challenges that could have been avoided for a better game experience. We made several updates to address the issue, but in retrospect, we should have killed that idea early on. Another thing I would have changed was the system to hunt for Nazi Übercommanders. Supporting the system and creating those extra missions took a lot of effort that could have been spent on further polishing and balancing of the main experience. We should have held off on this work until post-launch and instead made it part of our downloadable content.

(Not many know this, but if you’re a completionist and play through and unlock all the Übercommander missions, you will end up on a Manhattan riverside (through a very simple and lately added map) with a view of the destroyed Statue of Liberty. Linking the absolute end back to the core theme of the game.)

Reading between the lines on the above, I assume the next Wolf game will be easier on it’s default difficulty and you’ll die a lot less.

Lessons learned on Wolfenstein: Youngbloods, and possibly hints at future direciton:

While there are several things that we could have done differently to make life easier for us and to improve the quality of the game we shipped, I’m proud of the team and everything they managed to accomplish in the relatively short development time. It’s quite an amazing accomplishment when you think about it: it’s the very first Wolfenstein co-op title, it’s our first game with non-linear RPG progression, our first with female leads, the first Bethesda game that has been simultaneously released on Bnet, Steam, PS4, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch, and also the first that was released with a Buddy Pass. In addition, Youngblood was also the first Wolfenstein game to be released in an uncensored format in Germany. It was a risky project, but a risk that paid off in many ways and one that I will never regret; Wolfenstein: Youngblood has resulted in a MachineGames team and studio better equipped for the future. And our future is a very ambitious one.

Again, reading between the lines, future Wolfenstein games will probably have multiplayer components, and may lean into the RPG systems. Of course, TNO/TOB/TNC already had pseudo-rpg progression throughout the game. I doubt the next game will be fully coop enabled, but maybe.

Closing thoughts:

We all know, or we have at least learnt over the years, that there are more important things in life than work. It’s amazing how we have members of our team that joined as young kids in their early twenties and now have kids and families of their own – so many personal journeys that we have the privilege to have been part of. But work still needs to be an important part of our lives. We need to stay passionate about what we’re doing. And looking at what we have in development now and the great progress we are doing, our passion for games and game development is stronger than ever.

[FairyEmpire]

Lovely write-up, thanks! I think they’re a talented studio whose gameplay just falls a tiny bit short compared to the greatest FPS games of the generation, but they have what it takes to deliver a masterpiece if everything falls into place. They experimented a lot with the Wolfenstein formula, curious to see where they bring it next.

[ThereAreFourNaan]

I am a huge fan of TNO and liked TNC well enough. Really it’s the character work that is uniquely strong in the shooter space. I agree the gameplay could use a tune up. I reckon Wolf 3 won’t ship next year but a trailer or something might be possible at e3 perhaps. It’ll be my most hotly anticipated XGS game unless they stuff it up.

[DeoGame]

I just splurged on the Alt History Collection. Never played a game by Machine or Arkane before.

[ThereAreFourNaan]

@DeoGame

I just splurged on the Alt History Collection. Never played a game by Machine or Arkane before.

Hope you have a good time! A lot of fun to be had.

If you’re getting owned in The New Colossus, do not, I repeat, do not hesitate to lower the difficulty. It’s harder on average than the predecessor, both in terms of stealth being trickier to pull off, and in terms of dying easier. This is especially true on a gamepad where it’s not quite as easy to focus fire enemies down during intense fights.

All of the games have a pseudo old school sensibility - you’ll be duel wielding automatic shotguns and whatnot, health and armor pickups, etc.

Final piece of advice is explore your home base everytime you get back to one after a mission - there are several optional character beats that are really great.

[DeoGame]

@ThereAreFourNaan

Hope you have a good time! A lot of fun to be had.

If you’re getting owned in The New Colossus, do not, I repeat, do not hesitate to lower the difficulty. It’s harder on average than the predecessor, both in terms of stealth being trickier to pull off, and in terms of dying easier. This is especially true on a gamepad where it’s not quite as easy to focus fire enemies down during intense fights.

All of the games have a pseudo old school sensibility - you’ll be duel wielding automatic shotguns and whatnot, health and armor pickups, etc.

Final piece of advice is explore your home base everytime you get back to one after a mission - there are several optional character beats that are really great.

Thanks for the advice!