I think the irony poisoning and weirdness of New Colossus ruined the series set up by New Order.

New Order wasn't some literary masterpiece but it felt like it had a pretty consistent tone and took it self as seriously as it should without becoming some comedy.

New Colossus is full of pregnant woman fetish slop, toilet humor, drugs making you le crazey, and overall most of the main cast being something I have no idea who the target audience even was anymore other than probably stereotypical millenials.

The nazis are somehow this massive threat that pretty much destroyed the world and have all this advanced science, but at the same time you're meant to just laugh at them because they're lol so pathetic. It's just the whole "I depicted you as the incel and me as the chad" type of argument but doesn't work when these scumbags literally destroyed the world...

I have no idea how this even happened.

Considering they have the greatest character in Wolfenstein history with Horton, I highly disagree. And this is a series that started with Mecha Hitler as your final boss, it hasn't exactly always been very serious. Yes, NC is lighter in tone in some places than NO, and occasionally you're meant to laugh at Nazis, because, much like in real life, despite all their success, Nazis are lowlife, pathetic scum. New Colossus also has a wider variety of NPCs with you: Black revolutionaries, partisans, communists, former members of the French resistance, etc. You're travelling further, and engaging in more all-out war, resulting in wackier hijinks too.

New Order had its funny moments, immediately in your first mission you're saved by a panzerhund playing fetch with a grenade.

I generally agree although I think TNO has tone issues

It doesn't know whether to be serious (resistance members contemplating suicide, the grief of Anya's grandparents, mass oppression) or goofy (Jewish tech wizard awesomeness)

An example is the concentration camp. They want to be sensitive to the subject matter but it still ends with you piloting a Hebrew Mecha to blast Nazis. It's fun! But not sure where it wants to be

However TNC completely ditches most of the human drama except when Super Spez gets murdered - which IMO is one of the hardest hitting moments of the reboot trilogy

Saying "le crazey" and "stereotypical millenials" in the same sentence is wild, man.

I think I agree that TNC has some weird, offputting, and tonally jarring stuff, but I think it had much bigger problems in the gameplay department. I think it was too much of a fever-dream, too exaggerated and cartoony for sure, it felt like they were going for pulp comicbook and didn't quite land there. However, TNC also has a surplus of amazing moments that really do develop the world set up by TNO quite well, and definitely don't leave the game in an unsalvageable place- the narrative is pretty much poised to pick up right where it leaves off, or further down the line without too much trouble, and they can rein in the goofyness in the next installment. Characters like Horton and Grace are the future.

I mostly agree with you, but i think this change in the tone of the narrative was intended to represent a more “hopeful” world now that the resistance grew bigger with more ambitious plans. Perhaps it was also to show that amidst all those horrors people still manage to have fun and/or cope with humour. I do remember TNO having some lighter moments like that as well. The other points you’ve mentioned are totally valid though.

>The nazis are somehow this massive threat that pretty much destroyed the world and have all this advanced science, but at the same time you're meant to just laugh at them because they're lol so pathetic. It's just the whole "I depicted you as the incel and me as the chad" type of argument but doesn't work when these scumbags literally destroyed the world...

Except, "destroyed the world" aside, Nazis are pathetic, weird little insecure guys who simultaneously categorise themselves as "the best ever" and everyone else as worthless and degenerate, while also desperate to be seen as beset on all sides by those same enemies. Nazis are weird. This video puts it forward really well, with plenty of examples. Acknowledging that they're dangerous but ridiculing who they are as people and what they believe are not contradictory. If anything, the two have to go in concert: being feared and treated as this grave, serious threat is what the Nazis want their enemies to do, but they can't stand not being taken seriously.

Similarly, horrible world ruled by Nazis is a grim and dangerous place... but humanity only survives and emerges from the other side of that by embracing the things that make us human, and many of the things that make us human and help us cope with the darkness are art and humour and finding joy in little things.

The entire first half is BJ contemplating how he will continue on, knowing his body had borrowed time that even the exoskeleton could only extend so far. How he won’t get to see his child/children grow up, how he won’t be able to be there for and protect Anya, and how he failed to save Caroline as well. That’s combined with serious looks into his past, showing us what he rose above (his father) and moments in his childhood that’d define who he’d be as an adult (Billie, his relationship with his mother).

Is there an attempt to inject some grindhouse-esque humor into the series? Yes, and while it doesn’t always hit the mark, it helps keep the tone from becoming too abysmal and players feeling apathetic to the cause.

Afterwards, BJ has to confront not just the loss of Super Spesh and how it hurts grace (finding a letter in the end that details how he felt) but lingering trauma that the chosen side character is undergoing such as Fergus (his age, how he feels compared to people like BJ) and Wyatt (mental trauma from the years of loss resulting in him diving into drugs to push the pain away till he eventually crashes). There is a noticeable increase in the tone of hope once B.J. gets his new digs, but the seriousness is still quite there.

New Order was situated in a tone of sorrow, melancholy bordering hopelessness in the face of an unknown world conquered by a plainly evil foe. New Colossus starts out with an even more dire tone as shown by B.j.’s monologues in the first half. The humor of Super Spesh exists to demonstrate his eccentricities and to give players something to either laugh about or shake their head about so the dire tone of the first half doesn’t end up swallowing them. But Super Spesh and Grace aren’t just there for amusement, but to demonstrate as J mentioned in New Order the evil that had already existed in western society before and during the rise of the Nazi’s. B.j. knows this and also knows why Caroline chose Grace to lead the group after her death: they needed someone willing to charge ahead despite the odds and tragedy beside them, someone who could keep a calm head and make the plans while people like B.J. executed them.

Just because you failed to grasp the intricacies, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. This is especially apparent with you minimizing just WHY Wyatt was using drugs and being unable to see that a combination of the tech Deathshead helped steal and utilize for the Third Reich (culminating with the Nuclear Bomb being developed and utilized first by the Nazis) with the absence of heroes like B.J. and others keeping their heads down out of fear being what lead to their world domination.

Yes, felt like this as well

For me the only thing that was really dumb or out of place was your HEAVILY pregnant wife just going on commando raids. That itself was really dumb when she could of been the same character without the outlandish scenarios of her being super sexualized while being bathed in a obscene amount of blood.

The characters and what happens because of them to me is awesome. Your in the 60’s, a radical strong willed black revolutionary is literally perfect for this setting. Then you got the guy who is jimi hendrix but the Wolfenstein adaptation to it, he plays music that resembles the artist and is banned so he in hiding and apart of this counter culture in the game and at the time was drug use. One of the my favorite parts of the game is going through the conversations with him and eventually he gives you what we would assume is LSD or acid and then aends you on a wild ride with his music, how 60’s if you ask me.

The nazis legitimately haven’t changed either theres just more comedy to it. The interaction between the nazi soldier and the klan member in Roswell as they banter back and forth over their use of German. Its hilarious, both are both ignorant and their entire interaction is based on fear and the idea of superiority. Its a comedic relief while also showing the player how the world developed.

Accusing New Colossus of irony poisoning is weird.

I don't think you know what the term "irony poisoned" means, or its social connotations. Irony poisoning is a vector for fascism online. It's that thing where people on places like 4chan are posting pro-Nazi shit "ironically," which acts as a means of normalizing the rhetoric...

this ☝️

the scene with that KKK dudes made me laugh at the first few seconds, then I realized what really happened there and it made me shiver of fear.
Almost any "comedic" moment in that game felt like that for me.
Maybe we just see things differently.
I just wanted to point out that the "humor" didn´t work for me as it may be working for you.

The writing of TNC is simply terrible, period

First of all, they detail in the first game that the Nazi super soldiers are literally cyborgs that are part machine, part man and their armor is grafted to their bodies. There's no way they could've gotten an intact super soldier body to transplant BJ's head onto. Besides, this new super soldier body has never been lampshaded, nor even being hinted before. And no, having it just lying around the sub before isn't just enough. There's no justification why it's headless in the first place nor any reason why Nazi made it that way (and they don't even seem to actually use such bodies for super soldier purpose. Besides, even if it really is, considering that this body lacks a head, it's safe to assume that Nazis are skilled at head transplant and it's how they make their super soldiers. However, Seth has claimed that he invented such process only recently when he put his cat's head to a monkey. The body literally exist just as a deus ex machina for BJ to survive, with no in-universe justification whatsoever. It's tell, not show

Second, the tone is all over the place. While TOB and TNO is dark and depressing, it still delivers the story better and made players immersed with the pacing. TNC on the other hand, allows itself to be more humorous and light-hearted. This is bad, because all the humor that the writers bring into the game feels very out of place. I know that they wanted the game to be close in spirit to a grindhouse movie, but in my opinion, it does not work well. And the humor itself is just not very good. There were only a handful of jokes in both TNO and TOB, but they stood out for this exact reason! Those games definitely knows when to take itself seriously, unlike TNC which will stereotypically undermine moments of gravity with comedy. The game literally interrupt a serious moment to deliver a poop joke; this is Marvel level of humor of the worst type. Devs basically injected post modernism stupidity and girl bosses, and mixed it with teenage level humor. Last game (Youngblood) is the culmination of trying to go even a step further than that. And don't get me started with a poorly disguised author's fetishes

Third, the characters are badly written. They're not really interesting and there's not a lot I can say about every new character, since they are so forgettable. And I get the feeling that the writers never really cared for them too. For example, in the beginning of the game they introduce Grace. She's a girlboss resistance leader and Spesh, her husband, is a nutjob conspiracy theorist. Well, they kill the husband halfway through the game and he never gets mentioned again, it's like he never existed ! That aside, none of the new characters are good. There's no chemistry in the group whatsoever, it's like a Michael Bay movie where every character is an asshole to others for the sake of being an asshole (seriously, it's very irritating to hear their obnoxious ramblings). It's like the writer think the amount of curses and swearing equal a strong leader. The game has too much bloat and edgy narratives