Wolfenstein: Youngblood
About the game
Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the first modern co-op Wolfenstein adventure.Nineteen years after the events of Wolfenstein II, BJ Blazkowicz has disappeared after a mission into Nazi-occupied Paris. Now, after years of training from their battle-hardened father, BJ's twin daughters, Jess and Soph Blazkowicz, are forced into action.
Team up with a friend or play alone. Level up, explore, and complete missions to unlock new abilities, weapons, gadgets, cosmetics, and more to complement your playstyle and customize your appearance.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood features the most open-ended Wolfenstein experience to date. From a new base of operations located deep in the heart of the Paris catacombs, plan how and when to attack and dismantle the Nazi regime.
Release date: 26 July 2019
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Developer: Machine Games, Arkane Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Engine: id Tech 6
My role
In our collaboration with Machine Games on this spin-off, Arkane handled the level design and art for Paris streets levels, which are quite open-ended, and I worked on 2 of these districts.We designed the districts starting from scratch, working on both the mission design for main and secondary objectives, and the level design in collaboration with level artists. Machine Games did a finishing pass at the very end as we had to switch to another project.
I worked initially on the Political Detention Area 4 district, which has a mix of a shanty town and high security.
Then, I collaborated with another level designer on Little Berlin district.
More info about my work
For the level design of Political Detention Area 4, we mostly took inspiration from the shanty town present in the middle of Paris on the Petite Ceinture, an abandonned railway.I started sketching the layout in Sketch Up to get a first idea of how open-ended it would be, the main landmarks, where the main objectives would be and thinking about verticality right from the start.
After that, we build the layout with the level artist, getting more into details about the navigation and combat space, defining various shortcuts, placing secrets, etc...
In parallel, I refined the main objectives, detailling the different steps and prototyping this to get a first idea. We also designed the more generic but repeatable secondary missions to add some variety and offer opportunities while revisiting these districts.
The main challenges were the coop nature of the game, which we wanted to embrace but was coming with quite a lot of constraints as usual with multiplayer, and also had to work with an AI driven coop partner in case players were playing alone, meaning more script and setup for this AI.
The other part was the combat, which is a lot more developed as expected with Machine Games. The diversity in enemies and their behaviour meant we had to spend a lot more time doing some markup in the level so that the NPCs are as reactive as possible, even in contexts which were a lot more open and varied than Machine Games previous games.
My work was quite similar on Little Berlin district, although a small base was intially layed out by another level designer and after taking over this level, we were 2 level designers collaborating on this location.
We either reworked or iterated on the layout while also refining the mission design, and handled the scripting, setup for NPC encounters, etc... and as always collaborating with a level artist.
As the structure of the game is very open, walkthrough videos from players just show small parts of a level, but here are two videos where a player is going through these districts:
Political Detention Area 4: https://youtu.be/NojykFTg17k?list=PLs1-UdHIwbo6_WFVfEp5MGPMtELsOBG5B&t=963
Little Berlin: https://youtu.be/FSfg4JP4BtQ?list=PLs1-UdHIwbo6_WFVfEp5MGPMtELsOBG5B&t=455
Screenshots
