This is a bummer to hear. I played The New Order my first time around with it, last summer after DOOM, on the medium difficulty and had a hard time getting into a groove with the game for a variety of reasons. Many of them had to do with all the ways in which DOOM improved on what were some pretty obvious touchstones they lifted from New Order to make for a more fluid, dynamic experience, while others had to do with the oddly sloppy way the game handles going in and out of cutscenes and the outstandingly uninteresting and amateur way those cutscenes are directed. I was playing it on PS4, and came across a not-so-uncommon bug that makes the game immediately freeze upon launch, so I uninstalled it about halfway through the Wyatt storyline and didn't look back.
Given all the hype about this new one and the generally strange world we find ourselves in this year, though, I wanted to hop back into New Order and, on Dan and Vinny's go-ahead, just play it on the baby difficulty. Unfortunately, this is its own painful experience. There doesn't seem to be any of the unlocks or collectibles in this difficulty - at the very least, I remember this game pointing you towards world building materials a little more strongly than it has been for me on the Baby difficulty. But perhaps even worse, the game is still kind of hard. I'm fighting through the road blocks with my Polish friends about three hours earlier than I had been before when I was scouring the world for every map and enigma device piece I could get my hands on, but I'm still dying somewhat regularly and I find the idea of a game built around stealth with no stealth meter, map or any other indication that you're hiding or hidden other than the lack of alarm bells as absurd as I did the first time.
@bbalpert touches on something else that bugs me about the design of the first game, and thats the confusing design of everything. It's all stairwells and circular tunnel systems, to the point the number of hidden items and background documents in the game (again, apparently not on easy, but on normal difficulties) can drive you insane attempting to find them all. This manifests itself in other small ways, too. I vividly remember the first time I was in the torture garage last summer and I spent six or seven minutes looking everywhere for the "splatter protection" before I wound up just pulling up a guide. I came back to that moment a little over an hour ago, and it still took me three or four minutes to remember where they hid those goddamn goggles. There were other instances last summer, and now, where it just felt like Machine Games had a willfully obtuse approach to game design and, for me, it often saps moments of their emotional heft. It's a lot less tense when you've got a silent Nazi sitting in the chair behind you, and you keep glancing back at him with this confused shoulder shrug like, "I don't know what to do here either."
I'd like to get this game and see what it's up to myself once its on sale, but I was able to enjoy Mafia III despite its myriad flaws because at the end of the day that dev team made a game I enjoyed playing. So far, my two attempts with the first Wolfenstein game have made two things very clear: Machine Games have some big ideas that they're maybe not the best at executing (but perhaps got a bigger budget to smooth out those rough edges on this sequel?) and they also make very hard, unfriendly games that definitely hammer home how much it would suck to live in a world powered by Nazis but don't necessarily allow me the power fantasy of just mowing them down if I want it.
Doesn't help that I keep trying to play this game like Destiny 2, either!
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