It follows up last year’s surprisingly thoughtful Wolfenstein: The New Order with a standalone prequel set in an alternate 1946, but where TNO augmented its excellent shooter credentials with an intriguing alternate history and well-measured writing, The Old Blood prefers to dedicate itself solely to the business of Nazi-killing. This is why I think it’s particularly fitting that Wolfenstein: The Old Blood has been released as an expansion pa- I mean, an expandalone, because TOB is as old-school as they come. FPSes have since experimented with episodic content and smaller bite-size chunks sold as DLC, but while the RPG/strategy expansion pack concept lives on thanks to the sterling efforts of developers such as Firaxis and Blizzard, first-person shooters have pretty much discarded full-on expansion packs as a decidedly old-school idea. Given the great success of the idea here it’s easy to forget there was once a time when the FPS expansion pack was just as popular, starting with basic Doom WADs and continuing on through the Quake and Half-Life expansion packs to Call of Duty: United Offensive, which was the last really high-profile one. Yuri’s Revenge, Throne of Bhaal, Lord of Destruction - it’s a list that stretches on and on. When you say the words “expansion pack” to me, the things that immediately spring to mind are the classic expansion packs in the RPG and strategy genres. It’s been a little difficult to find the time and motivation to write recently so posts may be somewhat more infrequent over the next couple of months.
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