At QuakeCon 2013 this weekend, Bethesda Softworks announced a Wolfenstein The New Order delay until a to-be-announced time in 2014. The publisher also noted that the game will not have any multiplayer components. Wolfenstein: The New Order is scheduled to release on the current-gen systems and PC as well as the PS4 and Xbox One. Now we just don’t have a timeframe for its release.
Bethesda Softworks’ VP of Marketing (and all-around awesome dude) Pete Hines confirmed the Wolfenstein delay today via Twitter. His tweet did not indicate that the game was behind schedule, but that “it deserved some additional time for polish.” The delay affects “all platforms,” he said, not just the Xbox One or PS4 versions.
With that said, Hines acknowledged to Polygon that it’s been challenging to develop for systems whose hardware hasn’t even been finalized yet. Indeed, Microsoft just this week confirmed an upgrade to the clock speed of its GPU, which would certainly have development implications for Wolfenstein The New Order and any other game from other publishers.
Bethesda Softworks’ Hines said “Working on next-gen and current gen definitely has an impact, you’re developing for two different things. The fact that the next-gen stuff is still moving is also definitely a factor. But the most important thing was definitely just looking where it was at, what they needed to polish.”
As for the apparent removal of multiplayer modes from Wolfenstein The New Order, it turns out multiplayer wasn’t ever really on the table in the first place. The news was confirmed to GameSpot, but in his conversation with Polygon, Hines said that “…it’s just not trying to be a shooter, because it’s trying to be a shooter that also has driving elements, story elements, narrative, stealth sections – each one of those has to be excellent. It’s not just like we’re making a shooter, where if the shooting is good, then all 16 hours of the game will be good because it’s all we’re doing.”
During our Wolfenstein The New Order demo at E3 this year, we thought the game looked on track to provide a meaningful single-player experience. So, not having any multiplayer elements isn’t the end of the world to us, although news of the game’s delay to 2014 is a downer. But, if Bethesda and the developers at MachineGames can deliver the great single-player experience they teased at E3 2013, a Wolfenstein The New Order delay will be worth the wait.