MachineGames Looks to the Future

Congratulations on 10 years! How does it feel to be celebrating this milestone?

Jerk Gustaffson, Executive Producer: For many members of our team, it’s been even longer than 10 years. A lot of us has been a tightknit team for over 20 years. This longstanding professional experience and personal friendships are perhaps our greatest asset as a studio.

Lars Johansson, Studio Director: As Jerk mentioned, a lot of us had history together even before we founded MachineGames. the very late 90s most of the MachineGames founders were youngsters and were, for the most part, at two different companies. O3 Games in Östhammar and Starbreeze in Härnösand. Both companies joined forces in Uppsala as Starbreeze. Friendships were formed and over the years a few games were made before it was time to move on and get MachineGames going.

It's crazy that it's already been 10 years – time certainly flies when you're having fun. It has truly been a fantastic journey with plenty of challenges, not only during development to reach our desired level of quality for our games, but also to build and manage our studio to make it a great place to work.

John Jennings, Production Director: I haven’t been here for the full 10 years but, at times, it still feels like we’re a “new studio.” A decade brings it all home, though. We’d love to be celebrating in the office, but for obvious reasons we can’t be together right now. We’re still doing a 10th anniversary party, even though we can’t be together for it. We’re going to do a "cook-along" at home together, which I’m sure will generate some new memories!

__What motivated the team to form MachineGames? __

Jerk: Our common purpose as creative collaborators is making games we can commit our hearts and souls to. With MachineGames we saw an opportunity to build a studio from the ground up with laser focus on the kind of projects we love to develop.

Fredrik Ljungdahl, Gameplay Director: Having worked together for so long, we have a great understanding of how we operate as individuals and as a group. This is extremely beneficial when it comes to discussions, problem solving and decision-making.

With our joint experience from all aspects of game development, we wanted to create a company that was tailored from the ground up to provide the best possible environment to create great games.

__Even before founding MachineGames, many members of the studio worked on some amazing first-person shooters that blend action, stealth, and great storytelling. Would you say that those elements are the "pillars" of the studio? __

Jerk: For us it's always been about creating the most immersive experience possible. We tend to blend genres because it provides a more organic, less rigid interface with the game world.

Fredrik: I think that might be a side effect of working with the same group of people that made those games. Those are the types of games we like as players, so we enjoy creating them as game developers.

__Is there a philosophy behind balancing those elements? __

Fredrik: That’s a good—and tricky!—question. Anytime we consider that balance we remind ourselves that above all else, the game has to be fun to play.

It's important to give players variety throughout the game, providing different experiences as the story unfolds, and I think we find a natural balance between all those elements you mentioned – action, stealth, storytelling – while we’re creating these varied experiences. During development we look at ways we can improve and add polish, reducing areas we think might cause player frustration, or adding in gameplay elements we think players might like during a given scenario. If a player gets annoyed when playing the game, they´ll stop as they are not having fun.

__But you don’t just find balance in the gameplay, you find balance in the narrative as well – meshing heartfelt moments with comedy and tragedy, and bringing depth to previously one-dimensional characters. What you’ve done with BJ himself is a great example. In the earliest Wolfenstein games he’s a silent protagonist, but in the MachineGames titles he not only kicks ass, he has a deep, thoughtful inner monologue. Where’d the idea for this “new” BJ Blazkowicz come from? __

Tommy Tordsson Björk, Narrative Designer: One of our ambitions when making Wolfenstein: The New Order was to overturn preconceived notions of what a Wolfenstein game should or shouldn’t be. One of the most iconic things about Wolfenstein is the original protagonist BJ Blazkowicz, so of course we wanted to do something different with him too.

I think what makes him so fascinating is that we haven’t really changed him, we’ve just added several layers of emotional depth that you just couldn’t see before. He’s still the ass-kicking 80’s action hero of yore, but he’s older now. He’s grown sick and tired of the war. He just wants to settle down in a beautiful place out in the country and raise a family. It’s this conflict within him, his hatred towards Nazis, his instinctual drive to fight for what’s right, and his longing to find peace that sort of creates this “warrior poet” aspect of him, if you will.

__Wolfenstein: Youngblood was the first multiplayer title from the studio. What were some of the learnings you had in designing a multiplayer game vs. a single-player experience, and is multiplayer something we’re going to see more of from MachineGames? __

Fredrik: 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.

John: 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.

Each of the Wolfenstein games has pushed the technology envelope in some way, the latest being dynamic real-time raytracing reflections added to Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Are there any upcoming technologies you're excited for?

Jim Kjellin, Chief Technology Officer: One of the key items that's coming in the immediate future is the general availability of really fast storage. You've always been able to buy decently fast storage for your PC, but it will become standard in the next generation consoles.

This allows us to change how we think about game design. The historical issue of having to wait for loading to finish or artificially slowing the pacing before you can do major changes to the player experience will be a thing of the past.

John: I absolutely agree with Jim. With these super fast SSDs, we don't need to consider ways of entertaining the gamer while the levels load any longer! Allowing for bigger worlds and letting players jump around seamlessly within them are going to provide some exciting new experiences. I'm really looking forwards to that.

__What’s in store for the next decade at MachineGames? __

Fredrik: Games, games, and more games! I also think being part of Microsoft will help us make even greater games in the future. They have a huge number of knowledgeable people, great developers, tech solutions and hardware.