Wolfenstein 3 is officially in the works as id Software announces new game

MachineGames is officially working on another Wolfenstein game, as Xbox celebrates 25 years and threatens to use AI in future development.

Xbox is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, but between layoffs, leadership shake-ups, and potential studio closures, there isn’t an awful lot to be positive about. 

There have been new games in its big tentpole franchises, like Forza Horizon 6, Halo: Campaign Evolved, and Gears Of War: E-Day, but aside from the former, they haven’t exactly set the world alight or contributed any surge in interest for the Xbox Series X/S. 

To seemingly compensate for the lack of excitement, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma made several announcements on X on November 12 (three days shy of the original Xbox’s launch date of November 15), including two brand new titles.

The biggest was confirmation of Wolfenstein 3, which is ‘officially in production’ at developer MachineGames. The sequel’s existence has been rumoured for some time, but this is the first actual confirmation. 

The X account for MachineGames announced the game with two images, with the first showing a script page of Wolfenstein 3’s opening scene between protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz and Nazi general Otto Ackermann (which is presumably a flashback, as Otto is meant to be dead). 

The other image shows actors Debra Wilson and Brian Bloom in their motion capture suit, who play Grace Walker and Blazkowicz, respectively.

There’s no indication of whether Wolfenstein 3 will be an Xbox exclusive, like Gears Of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution, or when it could be released, but it will likely be a few years away yet.

Hot on the heels of ex-id Software employees forming a new studio, Sharma also confirmed the developer behind Doom: The Dark Ages is working on its next game. 

In a separate tweet, id Software said its next project is a ‘new game from our teams in Texas and Frankfurt, with game direction once again by Hugo Martin’, adding: ‘It’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more but we can’t wait for you to see what we’re working on.’

As a reminder, Xbox recently gutted id Software of roughly half its employees, effectively dismantling one of the most historic studios in the business. However, Hugo Martin has remained and was the director on Doom: The Dark Ages.

You’d assume that the new game is simply Doom 4, but the fact that they haven’t confirmed suggests perhaps it isn’t. A Quake reboot has been rumoured for many years now, with a lot of talk of MachineGames making it, but perhaps those plans have changed now.

This announcement, however, came bundled with good news for anyone who enjoyed the excellent DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages. A new Slaughter mode is coming to the shooter on Monday, November 16, which is a round-based survival mode with randomised encounters. 

Elsewhere in the same thread, Xbox revealed four minutes of new Fable gameplay, which is bizarrely underwhelming. Additionally, 21 original Xbox games, including such classics as The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and… er, Disney’s Chicken Little, are now available on PC via backwards compatibility. 

In a separate blog post, entitled 25 Years Of Xbox, Sharma provided an overview of Xbox’s past, while providing some hints towards the future. 

In the post, Sharma laments how ‘too many ideas never become games’ today because the ‘cost, resources, and risk required to create them have grown’. This leads into a dramatic paragraph which has big generative AI energy – without explicitly mentioning the word.

‘Throughout human history, the scale of what we could create was determined by the people, capital, and resources we could command,’ Sharma wrote. ‘That relationship is beginning to break. A single person will soon be able to wield capabilities that once required entire nations.

‘A small team will be able to build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars. And our largest studios will be able to pursue ambitions as far beyond today’s games as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is from its first entry in 1982.’

Unsurprisingly, she makes no reference to what happens to those hundreds of people, that were previously needed to make games, but given the fate of the thousands of developers Microsoft has laid off over the course of the last few years it’s not hard to guess.

She added: ‘I believe the future of gaming will look more like its beginning, when a small team with a big idea could change how the world plays. Our responsibility is to deliver great games, unmistakable hardware, and give more people the chance to make something the world has never seen.’

This idea of small teams being able to create massive worlds is clearly a reference to the use of generative AI, and while she makes it sound like man’s discovery of the wheel, the jury is still out over how useful the tool actually is in game development – especially as it threatens to invade the creative nature of video games as a whole. 

This isn’t the first time Sharma has danced around the topic. Last month, the announcement of a new division, Xbox Labs, dedicated to ’emerging ideas’, also screamed AI without any mention of the phrase. You’d think if they were so confident about its potential to improve games, it wouldn’t be so sheepish about saying its name out loud – but clearly she knows how most gamers feel about the technology.

It all feels particularly hypocritical, and cowardly, considering Sharma, just six months ago, was the one who promised no ‘soulless AI slop’. She might argue generative AI will help create games with actual artistic merit, but when the technology is being widely scrutinised by major developers, it all comes off as hollow corporate noise from a failing brand.

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