Last year, MachineGames, the developers behind the Wolfenstein series, released the latest entry in the aforementioned series, subtitled Youngblood, where players took control of BJ Blazkowicz’s daughters in a co-op adventure. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t as well-received as the previous two games in the series — The New Order and The New Colossus — but, with that said, the devs are still interested in making more co-op multiplayer games.
In a post on Bethesda‘s website, MachineGames’ gameplay director, Fredrik Ljungdahl, talked about his experience while developing Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and said that he’d love to take the lessons he learned while making that game and apply it to future co-op titles.
“We love co-op games, so it was a great experience to bring co-op to the Wolfenstein universe with Youngblood. Designing for multiplayer is quite different compared to single-player games and it’s also a lot harder to test. Especially as we also made the game a lot less linear compared to what we are used to. The specially crafted events that we’ve been known to use in previous games are often based on the player’s location and progression and other sets of known ‘facts.’ These assumptions and frameworks don’t necessarily work in the co-op, nonlinear approach. We learned a lot on Youngblood, and it would be fun to apply some of that knowledge to future games.”
.@MachineGames looks ahead at the next decade in part two of our interview with the development team! https://t.co/1rSZyGmYM8 pic.twitter.com/R5m01gDirJ
— Wolfenstein (@wolfenstein) October 16, 2020
Additionally, John Jennings, who is the production director at MachineGames, talked about his experience while developing Youngblood, which was their first co-op multiplayer title, and how that experience will help the development of future games.
“Our first foray into multiplayer with Youngblood helped us learn a lot from both a gameplay and from a technical perspective. Understanding that doing the technical learning at the same time as doing the gameplay learning may be too much of a challenge is possibly one of our biggest takeaways, and it’s one we won’t need to go through a second time in multiplayer development.”
As of this writing, there’s still nothing official regarding a third main installment to the Wolfenstein series, and whether or not it’ll also be a co-op game. If MachineGames decides to continue down the co-op route, then the third Wolfenstein game could feature BJ teaming up with one, or both of his daughters.
Of course, MachineGames works under the Bethesda banner, so it’s possible that all of their future games, Wolfenstein included, will be Xbox exclusive titles.