Wolfenstein: The New Order

What works

Everything, basically. I installed and completed the entire campaign under WINE in a completely clean WINEPREFIX (aside from the usual registry tweak to fix Steam fonts). I installed a retail copy from a set of DVDs, and then Steam required a further 10Gb download (apparently a day 1 patch). Once the game finally installed, I was impressed with the frame rates I was getting. This is an OpenGL game, so no DirectX -> OpenGL conversion performance issues. My laptop's GTX660M was able to run the game at 1920x1080 at high detail without issue. At no point was the gameplay framerate noticeably slow, which I found to be quite impressive considering the quality of the graphics.

What does not

The game crashes too frequently for my liking. There was one chapter in particular around 8 hours into the campaign that involved a moon walk where three flying drones were in your direct path - which were impossible to sneak past. Every time I was involved in combat with the three drones, the game would crash within seconds. The trick was to lure out one drone at a time into a separate area and take them out individually to avoid a crash and complete that section. That was the only section of the game with always reproducible crashes. The rest of the game would just crash randomly, with certain chapters/sections seemingly more likely to crash than others. I spent quite a lot of time on the final boss fights for example, yet there was no crash there at any point. The stack trace suggests XAudio2_7.dll might be the culprit. Other test results for older WINE versions indicate native DLLs were required, but 1.7.30 did not require touching any DLL at all. I'll also point out that I experienced some stuttering and audio/video sync issues during some cut-scenes - but only when I used my Logitech G35 USB headset. I never experienced these issues when I used my SoundBlaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro USB soundcard. There are reports of these issues occurring under certain Windows configurations too, so it's probably a bug in the game. I know my G35 headset normally works fine with WINE applications (although this is the first time I've needed to use a 64-bit WINEPREFIX and did not run in a chroot, which could also be related).

Workarounds

What was not tested

I didn't try all possible graphics setting combinations. In particular, low graphical detail settings configurations were not tested. I also did not use vertical sync.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I'd give the game Platinum if it wasn't for the annoying crashes. As it stands, I must mark the game Silver as it does not work flawlessly currently (but it's very close). Add "+com_skipIntroVideo 1" to the application launch options in Steam to bypass the unskippable startup splash screens, which will help you avoid most of the pain when crashes occur.