Wolfenstein 3 and new id Software game confirmed, as Xbox boss somehow unrelatedly shouts about one person soon wieldling “capabilities that once required entire nations”

Xbox have confirmed that Wolfenstein 3 is indeed in production at Indiana Jones and the Great Circle devs MachineGames and that Doom makers id Software have started work on their next game after losing a bunch of staff to the mass layoffs across Microsoft’s gaming division this year.

“A single person will soon be able to wield capabilities that once required entire nations,” isn’t part of the marketing spiel for either of those games. Instead, it’s something Xbox CEO Asha Shama has bellowed amid a rant outlining how she sees the company’s future.

The Wolfenstein and id confirmations came as Xbox had a bit of a social media party to commemorate their 25th birthday. Sharma, ever keen to be seen right next to any positive news coming out of the company, confirmed Wolfenstein 3 is in production by posting a photo showing a few lines from its script. Around the same time, she shouted out Doom: The Dark Ages Revelations’ incoming Slaughter Mode, adding that “the team is already working on its next game”.

The official id Software account responded to note that this next game is being made by their “teams in Texas and Frankfurt, with game direction once again by Hugo Martin”, and that “it’ll be some time before [they’re] ready to share more”.

Alongside hollering about these couple of games, Sharma put out a 25th anniversary statement which for the most part does the sort of bigging up of Xbox’s past you’d expect. Good times were had, we blazed a trail and made lots of money, etcetera. The final section saw the exec attempt to look forward to the next 25 years for Xbox.

“While modern games demonstrate the heights of human craft in ways unimaginable just decades ago, the cost, resources, and risk required to create them have grown just as dramatically,” she wrote. “As a result, too many ideas never become games, and too many games fall short of what their creators imagined. For decades, this has been the unavoidable tradeoff of ambition. We must change this.

“Throughout human history, the scale of what we could create was determined by the people, capital, and resources we could command. 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.”

That certainly sounds a lot like the sales pitch the biggest proponents of generative AI keep wheeling out, while avoiding saying generative AI out loud in the hopes of making it more palatable to folks who might not make the connection. I’m waiting for Sharma to put out another post revealing that she accidentally mixed another section of the Wolfenstein script into her celebratory musings, but I’m not holding my breath.

Xbox parent company Microsoft are still currently subject to a BDS movement boycott over their reported ties to the Israeli military.