Xbox boss Asha Sharma has taken to social media to officially announce that Wolfenstein 3 is in development at MachineGames.
“Wolfenstein 3 is officially in production at MachineGames,” she writes. “One of gaming’s most important franchises, and a team that has done remarkable work bringing it forward. Looking forward to sharing more.”
She then attached a page from the game’s script from Chapter 1. It’s set in ‘Nazitraz’, with BJ and Fergus interrogating a German named Otto.
The manner of the announcement comes with very little ceremony, plainly confirming what a lot of people expected and had reported that MachineGames were working on next.
The Swedish studio was founded in 2009 by former Starbreeze developers and managed to land the Wolfenstein IP and be acquired by Bethesda in quick succession. This led to the popular Wolfenstein: The New Order in 2014 and the rest, as they say, is alt-history Nazi blasting, with the standalone prequel, The New Blood, arriving the following year, and then a full sequel, The New Colossus in 2017.
Since then, the studio has diverged from the franchise. There were a couple not-so-good spin-offs, and the studio has regularly produced new campaigns for classic id Software games to go alongside modern releases of Doom, Quake and Quake II. The biggest deal, of course, was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which brought a different flavour of Nazi bashing to the table. It’s pretty great.
But between developing a new IP, cooking up another Indiana Jones story (in an increasingly busy timeline), and sticking with the tried and true, the obvious next step for Microsoft, it seems, was to greenlight Wolfenstein 3. This ongoing development might explain why MachineGames has remained out of the headlines during Microsoft’s recent spate of layoffs, even while Wolfenstein series creator id Software was dramatically reduced in size on the eve of the launch of DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages.
While shrunk in size, Sharma and id Software both posted on social media to confirm that the studio is now at work on its next project, headed up by Hugo Martin, who’s been Game Director since Doom Eternal, and was Creative Director on Doom 2016.
via Resetera
