Wolfenstein: The New Order Performance Review @ [H]

I disagree with the end of this review, yes the game Graphiclly is no Crysis, but then I don’t know (or Understand) the problems the experts have with this engine.
But don't let that put you off, so far have found this to be a fun well thought out game with lots of nice little touches.

Is it worth £35.00, probably not, but then games have been over priced for years.

To me game play is what matters, not how amazing it looks.
 
Your technical review was good.

You guys seem to have a chip on your shoulder left over from Rage, and it has extended to this game.

Yes, there are some graphical weakness here for a game released in 2014.
Does it effect the gameplay, not at all.
Does it change the story, nope.

I have had no PC issues with this game. My SLi is working just fine.
Loaded up the latest NVidia beta drivers off Guru3D. Loaded the game.....now that 10 GB add-on was a bit much.....:eek:

and away I went.

In order to run the game nicely in Surround I had to use HaYden's Flawlesswidescreen, but that took all of 2 minutes.

I like the game so far...played about 90 minutes last night.

It's not Crysis3, it's about on the level of Singularity if you ever played that.

Just my 2 cents. But at least I'm playing the game, not bashing it because of the professional reviews.
 
Just a quick tech update...

I was able to enable both SSAA and FXAA using RadeonPRO. So you can use AA now if you like.

The biggest texture pop issue was solved by running the game from a SSD rather than HDD. When I first installed it I didn't want to allocate space on the SSD (45GB!!! MEGATEXTURES OMG!!!), but the texture pop issue was almost totally solved by running from SSD.

As much as megatextures get bashed (and there are some odd texture quality inconsistencies), the outdoor areas have a very... not sure how to say this... non-polygon feel to them. BF4 and Crysis3 terrain always had the feel of textured polygons to me. Not in a bad way, it was just a "feel" to them. Wolf:TNO terrain just seems more organic and "flowy" to me. It makes the world feel more fleshed out. Is it worth the 45GB install size and minor texture pop (now that I have it optimized)? Tough question, though I'm leaning to "yes" on that. It's so different from the way other engines are tackling these problems, I'm enjoying the variety.

And the knife takedowns are not for the squeamish. #flex
 
GoodBoy said:
With John Carmack gone, it seems doubtful there will ever be an id tech 6 engine.
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I was in college during the golden era of id software; spent countless hours playing Quake and Quake 2 online. It seems to me that Carmack lost his golden touch after Quake 2. I remember Quake III Arena being a letdown. I did enjoy Quake 4 and Doom 3, but they weren't really the revolutionary games that I thought Quake 1 and 2 were.

It might be for the best if id gets in some fresh blood.
 
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I thought that part of the reason Carmack stayed at id after 2011 was to fulfill some sort of obligation to Zenimax in finishing a new engine for Doom 4?
 
how does this game deal with multimonitor surround / eyefinity?
 
Game is fun so far. I think I'm an eye-candy whore, but I can suspend disbelief with the best of them. Haven't noticed alot of these issues so far, but don't dispute they are there.

Am I the only one that gets a kick out of the front page picture showing BJ rodeoing a Titan?:D

Now THAT is a fun game.
 
Brent_Justice said:
I want to see the advancement of PC gaming. I want to see games push PCs to their limits and create a need to upgrade and want better hardware, better video cards, all to improve the gameplay experience. I want to see the PC gaming segment be forward thinking, and prove how and why PC gaming can be massively superior to console gaming. The potential is there, now use it.
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I think that is a noble ideal.
But you are a hammer looking for nails. Your job here centers around just that, so you have a built in bias......that isn't bad, but it explains why the reviews are harsh if the GPU isn't pegged out to 100% and it takes three or four to make the game run.

I have two high end systems, sure I like to see the pretty graphics, but I also like to have fun......sometimes those two go together and sometimes they don't.

We have to face it, there are millions more consoles in the world than there are PCs with thousand dollar GPU combinations.
We are lucky the developers even make PC games anymore. Few people know enough or even want to go to the trouble to mess with drivers and settings.
People want to pop in a disc and play.
I spent two and a half hours loading this game into my PC last night.....that was after loading new NVidia drivers, researching any and all wide screen issues, updating my flawlesswidescreen application, setting up my machine, and finally playing for about 90 minutes.
To criticize a game for the "look" is within your speciality, but we also need to be realistic.

I hate consoles, but if it wasn't for their popularity I wouldn't have many games to use on my PC.:(
 
Cheers at that, Magoo. Perfect summary of how I feel.

Great graphics don't always make the game. That's cliche, but it's absolutely true. I have played some truly awesome games that didn't push graphical boundaries. Come on. Let's face it, anyone that has played ME1, ME2, Dragon Age Origins, Dark Souls, Darksiders, Darksiders 2, Assassin's Creed IV, Borderlands, know that none of these were amazing games in terms of graphics.

Does that matter. In my mind, if it's a fun game, it's a fun game. I play games for fun. Now great graphics are icing on the cake but they don't make a bad game a good one. You can argue until you're blue in the face but Crysis 3 was hardly the best game ever. But man are the graphics great huh.

I'll take a great game with medium graphics over a poor game with awesome graphics anyday, personally. Now as I mentioned earlier, this isn't a fault of Brent of course. He doesn't review games. He reviews GPUs. So I can understand the context of this review. Although there does seem to be a "chip on the shoulder" about Rage. I get it - I didn't like Rage one bit either and I was completely let down by that game. Despite Wolf using the same engine, I can assuredly state that Wolf TNO is a MUCH MUCH better game than Rage. I played Rage for about an hour before uninstalling. Wolf TNO is still holding my interest and i'm loving it.
 
Very biased review towards graphics vs.how fun it is. This is [H] so it makes sense but try and be a little more professional than that. Just my 2 cents.
 
JMke said:
this!
doesn't matter if the game is good/bad. it's about the tech :)

Doom 3 doesn't play nice with Eyefinity, does Wolfenstein fix this?
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Agreed...then they should have kept those other opinions out of the article correct? Can't have it both ways...
 
JMke said:
this!
doesn't matter if the game is good/bad. it's about the tech :)

Doom 3 doesn't play nice with Eyefinity, does Wolfenstein fix this?
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Doom3 is brilliant in EyeFinity if you use a simple application from widescreengamingforums.

But you need to remember when Doom3 was made.

No, Wolf does not improve on these issues out of the box.

As I said in my post above, you need to download or update your flawlesswidescreen application, enable it and then start the game. It allows 16:9.
The game only does 16:10 which is distorting in Surround/Eyefinity.

That said HaYden had this fixed on the date of release of the game and it works flawlessly.

I guess I just have a different take. I like the tech but I also remind myself why I play games......they take my head away from my work and they are fun. A plain looking girl can be way more fun than a high maintanence beautiful model.
 
I do have one suggestion for future articles though: test input latency. I discovered after playing Doom 3 BFG on very low-end hardware that very low pipeline latency does actually make a surprisingly dramatic difference in playability, and the BFG edition implements a number of tricks Carmack devised to cut out latency for VR support. All you need to do the tests is a HFR camera.

I'd wager that Wolf probably exhibits pretty low latency as well.
 
I appreciate the review. Sad that the developer crippled the PC version of the new "Wolfenstein" game. :(

I hope that won't be the case if/when GTA 5 comes out.
 
I don't think anyone on the [H] is ragging on the game for game play, and perhaps the graphics looking a little "dated" might not be an issue... IF the glaring technical problems from Rage had been addressed with this game and fixed for good. No SLI/Crossfire support, and 60FPS cap is a huge downer for people running high-end machines, and being restricted on options by an autodetect of VRAM and lack of aspect ratio control can be frustrating. Hopefully there can be some kind of config workarounds for these things. I know I got RAGE running smooth as melted butter for texture popping, etc, with the proper config. Maybe that can help down the pipe, but this was an initial out-of-the-box review of the technical nature of the game.

kohl said:
I was in college during the golden era of id software; spent countless hours playing Quake and Quake 2 online. It seems to me that Carmack lost his golden touch after Quake 2. I remember Quake III Arena being a letdown.
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Yeah... Q3 out of the box lacked that gritty feel from Q1 and Q2. You need to check out Generations Arena for Q3. You can kick around the Quakeguy with the guy from Quake 2, and vice-versa. ;)
 
I don't have any of these texture loading issues with my 6GB Titan.

It's seamless, and performs silky smooth at 2560x1600 w/Ultra.
 
beowulf7 said:
I appreciate the review. Sad that the developer crippled the PC version of the new "Wolfenstein" game. :(

I hope that won't be the case if/when GTA 5 comes out.
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Crippling would imply intent. I think they were just limited by the engine they built the game on and MachineGames did their best within their budget (time and monetary) to add at least some more PC functionality than Rage did. The main thing though is that they were severely limited in what they could do with id Tech 5, in my opinion.

And do you really think GTA 5 is going to be any better than R*'s previous PC ports?
 
Armenius said:
Crippling would imply intent. I think they were just limited by the engine they built the game on and MachineGames did their best within their budget (time and monetary) to add at least some more PC functionality than Rage did. The main thing though is that they were severely limited in what they could do with id Tech 5, in my opinion.

And do you really think GTA 5 is going to be any better than R*'s previous PC ports?
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GFWL was the far bigger issue with GTA IV. Personally speaking, GFWL is the biggest piece of shit to ever grace PC gaming in the past several years - I've had so many issues with it that it really got to the point of not buying anything that used it unless it was free. So yeah, I would not have bought any of the Batman games but I got them free in GPU promos. Thankfully, GFWL is done for and all of the Batman games are now steamworks.

I don't think GTA V will be as bad as GTA IV. GFWL was one problem with it, the other problem was performance. In fact, performance is still an issue with GTA IV, it doesn't run as well as it should on modern hardware (even though it is in fact a good game). That was one of those games that was and is impossible to max out. Last I tried anyway. I'm not really a stickler for maxing games out anyway, so it wasn't a huge deal...

Anyway, I think GTA V will be a reasonably good port. It won't be perfect more than likely, but I was reasonably happy with Max Payne 3 on PC which was also done by Rockstar. So i'm optimistic about GTA V on PC, but it apparently is a LONG WAYS away unfortunately. 2015 last I heard.

But I agree with the sentiment. Any technical issues with the ID tech 5 engine used by Wolf TNO really cant' be bypassed if a 3rd party is using it (I don't believe). However I still maintain the game (Wolf TNO) is a very fun one.
 
Modred189 said:
Doesn anyone know why AA options are apparently absent from Id 5?
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No idea. I haven't noticed any graphical problems with forcing it using RadeonPRO.

Perhaps they didn't have time to get it QA approved, or there were problems on some configs and it wasn't going to be possible to get the bugs tracked down in time.
 
Modred189 said:
Doesn anyone know why AA options are apparently absent from Id 5?
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I have a feeling that it is probably tied back to the artificial VRAM limitations they put in the game. Rage actually did have in-game AA options.
 
Modred189 said:
Doesn anyone know why AA options are apparently absent from Id 5?
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They aren't absent, just not enabled in the options menu. Enabling them through the console works just as it did in Rage where r_multisamples 4 enables 4xAA. Performance is fine and I've yet to notice any artifacts.

Getting them to stick is another issue as it resets on loads. It's probably just a bug.
 
JMke said:
how does this game deal with multimonitor surround / eyefinity?
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I'm running on a single 290 at 6040x1080 with High Settings. It's pretty much pegged at 60 all the time other than the occasional dip into the 40s.

I used the tool provided belowto get it properly setup. Let me know if you have any questions.

http://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=27288


The game itself is ok, nothing super awesome. Like others said, the textures are awful...even when I had it set to ultra.
 
There will be a ton of game reviews. Everyone knows it's a FPS which should push the graphic limits which has been the norm forever. [H] clearly titled this a performance review which I think is more important for this genre. Part of this boils down to marketing and the ability to play on consoles. The other laziness and no desire to be on the edge . It's obvious there is no effort made to be the leader in graphics performance anymore at ID and a leader with vision was lost and another needed . It's the money machine once again.
 
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Seems my fears had been warranted... sad to hear.
Thanks for saving me another $60 or w/e this title is gonna cost...
 
eh, methinks the review is misleading in the way it is putting people off. Yes, a lot of the points about the graphics are valid. But the game is a lot more than that. It is fun to play, the story is excellent and a lot of the mechanics are well thought out and just work.
 
Running on a Galaxy GTX 780 HOF with everything cranked, no problems except some strange graphical artifacts. I'm sure that's just the game since everything else is fine. If you force vsync / triple buffering in the NVIDIA Control Panel, it screws up the game A LOT. Go into the Wolf TNO profile and disable triple buffer and set vsync to 'application controlled' and that should greatly reduce artifacts.

So far the gameplay is fine, just too bad that the visuals are a bit screwy. There'll probably be an updated driver by the time I finish the game.

hordaktheman said:
They aren't absent, just not enabled in the options menu. Enabling them through the console works just as it did in Rage where r_multisamples 4 enables 4xAA. Performance is fine and I've yet to notice any artifacts.

Getting them to stick is another issue as it resets on loads. It's probably just a bug.
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Damn, really? I have r_multisamples in my command line options and I noticed that it didn't look like it was being applied. I'm guessing that enabling console in this game doesn't disable achievements like in RAGE?
 
Quick updates:

-Textures popping is caused by running out of VRAM, try to lower the resolution, use compression or lower texture quality, there are many users who don't suffer this problem, including me.

-You can force FXAA and eliminate most aliasing through NV control panel

-With NV cards, you can edit the config file to use GPU CUDA texture transcode for faster texture streaming, (just like RAGE) the command is:
vt_useCudaTranscode "1"
 
iRandoMi said:
I'm running on a single 290 at 6040x1080 with High Settings. It's pretty much pegged at 60 all the time other than the occasional dip into the 40s.

I used the tool provided belowto get it properly setup. Let me know if you have any questions.

http://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=27288


The game itself is ok, nothing super awesome. Like others said, the textures are awful...even when I had it set to ultra.
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thank you for your reply!

where does the HUD appear?
 
does anyone have comparison screenshots of low-medium-high-ultra textures each with compression on/off? the main two i want to see are high and ultra, because my 770 has 2 GB of VRAM i can't use the ultra setting and even turning off compression with the high setting causes my framerate to drop to 0-1.5.
 
Armenius said:
Crippling would imply intent. I think they were just limited by the engine they built the game on and MachineGames did their best within their budget (time and monetary) to add at least some more PC functionality than Rage did. The main thing though is that they were severely limited in what they could do with id Tech 5, in my opinion.

And do you really think GTA 5 is going to be any better than R*'s previous PC ports?
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I don't know, for someone of the options to not exist, such as a 2 GB GTX 770 not being able to have ultra high settings, even though it's capable of it, seems like shoddy programming or for whatever reason, intentional crippling.

We'll see about the PC version of GTA 5, but I don't recall hearing a lot of complaints about some of the prior GTA games' ports.
 
JMke said:
thank you for your reply!

where does the HUD appear?
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A few screenshots for reference. It's pretty good actually other than cutscenes which are out of whack. Apparently the dev of that tool is working on it but I'll probably complete the game before he does. haha oh well, still pretty fun and it definitely progressively gets better as you progress through the game.

http://imgur.com/a/PzO2W#jBl2Gxr
 
I wouldn't even pay .25c for this pos game, why did they even bother making the PC version.
 
Looks like you can put all of your custom commands into a text file and execute it.

So basically, I created a custom.cfg file, put it in the C:\Users\username\Saved Games\MachineGames\Wolfenstein The New Order\base\ directory. That custom.cfg contains whatever variables I want to change so I just have to type "exec custom.cfg" into the console to get it going and it changes the variables. Suppose you could also bind a key to that as well.
 
According to Gpu-z I'm maxing out at 2007 mb's and averaging like 1940-60 Mb's of vram usage with vt-compress disabled and custom settings at 1080p with everything set higher than possible for a 2gb card. Game feels smooth for the most part. Only once got severe stuttering at beginning of game load. Went away with reloading the level again. Too bad you can't force ultra settings because I bet I'll barely go over 2gb vram at 1080p. Could be wrong though. So far so good. Like the action in the game. AI is ok. Graphics are decent but not earth shattering. Feels like COD meets Wolfenstein!

PS: Bought game using Bestbuy RZ credits. Game not worth more than $40.
 
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