We're not talking about "fighting nazis" (nice attempt to shift the goalposts there) we're talking about "killing nazis" and similar graphic synonyms of repeated ad nauseam.
Personally, I don't care to join into any outrage, and I don't think that the Wolfenstein games are any problematic, you're actually killing pixels, not people.
That being said, as someone living in Europe, what I consider concerning is that extremism in America has reached the point in which violence against the other side is seen as something good and heroic even in real life, and not just in World War II. It's applied to today.
Wolfenstein games aren't problematic, but the obsessive, chest-beating talk of killing this and that is at the very least distasteful. I have never once in my life seen another FPS developer who talked so much and with so much misplaced pride about killing. It's a game. You're not killing anyone. You're not actually a super action hero fighting against a tyrannical regime. You're a dude or dudette in a comfy room with a controller in your hands shooting at pixels that can't really hurt you.
So maybe it'd be better to chill about this whole idea that killing people is great as long as they're bad people. Killing is at times necessary but it's never good, let alone fun. It's certainly not a problem to do it in games, but I don't think it's a good idea to turn it into a marketing slogan and drum it for years.
Yeah, I think the core concept of Wolfenstein is great for an FPS and loads of fun whilst the violent content allows it to be a little bit "edgy" and "controversial" at the same time.
I definitely don't need the developers, publishers etc beating me over the head with it constantly though. OK, guys, I get it. Nazis were bad your game is about fighting them in an alternate history scenario, great. I want to play but I am not going to cheer and clap like a seal everytime you say "it's a game about.... killing Nazis". Just fucking stop.
I also have a deep suspicion that some of this is done to mitigate potential criticism of the game itself. Like "our game is ALL about killing Nazis so if you don't like it then what does that say about you". I think they purposefully leaned into this hoping that reviewers would say "OK, this is the one game I don't want to be seen as not liking".
It's like how the hell do you manage to basically annoy people into not wanting to buy your game?
I think from our position, 80 years after the fact, we don't really "get" the severity of what was going on in Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s. We don't really understand the horror of war in that era and yet we personalize it as if we were somehow there.
People saying things like "the last time the Nazis were taking over WE stood up to them and killed them all". What the fuck?
Folks who seem to legitimately think that when a group of them batter the shit out of an unarmed journalist (regardless of provocation) that this is somehow akin to flying over to Europe to potentially die far from home in a horrific manner.
The new Wolfenstein games would have been fine just marketing them as what they were. Fun FPS games with an interesting premise and a bit of gritty violence to cap it all off. There was never any need to try and link it to modern day politics and never any need to keep banging on the "our game lets you kill Nazis" drum over and over again.
I think there is a very strange contradiction in trying to sell an ultra violent shooting game to an audience that supposedly abhors violence and guns.
Then complaining that the levels of pandering made people, who DID want that ultra violent shooter, turn round and say "actually you are kind of being annoying about this now".
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