Xbox a 2012 360 build of Wolfenstein: The New Order (The New World) has been recovered and posted online

[Krvavi Abadas]

just in time for the game’s 10th anniversary!

yes, Xbox 360. continuing the trend of games seemingly designed for 8th generation consoles being prototyped on older hardware. with other notable examples including the 2013 Killer Instinct game and Homefront: The Revolution.
however, you might be surprised to hear that even the final version made it onto the 360/PS3, with the former having to squeeze the whole game on FOUR DISKS.

it took the release of “The Old Blood” for the saga to stay locked to PS4/Xbox One, and even then the decision was likely made after the project went from being DLC to a standalone game.

as for the prototype itself, it seems to be a vertical slice created to show Bethesda’s executives their current progress. with only a small section taken from the fourth chapter being playable, and no in-game assets before or past that point existing in the files
however, a pretty solid chunk of the game’s cutscenes (which are basic Bink video files) were left over. showing them in practically every development state.

from basic storyboards….

to raw recordings of the motion capture sessions….

to pre-visualization renders….

pretty much every base is covered up until around roughly Chapter 5-Chapter 6, at which point the cutscenes are replaced with multiple copies of a short placeholder slideshow featuring concept art.

the “recovery” mentioned in the thread title was also reportedly quite literal, as whoever owned the dev kit it was taken from (presumably it was lying around at Bethesda’s offices) did attempt to delete the files, meaning the new owner had to manually recover them. with the excecutable in particular being so badly fragmented that quite a bit of work needed to be done to fix it.
such lack of care towards a piece of history is particularly notable as ID Software themselves used to publicly share prototypes back when they were a fully independent company. even giving an unofficial database of ID Tech 1 mods permission to host the various DOOM alpha builds after they began getting spread around online post-release.

 

[Decimator Omega]

Hello,

I’m the person behind dumping this build. It was a team effort to get the exe to work as I had no part in that, but I would like to clarify some things. This build of the game came from a blue XNA Final 360 Dev Kit.

I bought the kit from a private seller and the story behind the kit is he found it many years ago in a recycling center. Thankfully he hardly ever used it and never ran any games on it, the kit was completely empty. He mainly just kept it as a display piece. I did ask him if he dumped the hard drive and he said no, so I knew that when I bought the console for my own personal homebrew creation use, I needed to dump the hard drive before I do anything. I did a network hard drive dump so I didn’t have to open the console, because this kit is in absolute pristine condition and I didn’t want to damage it.

Once the dump was done that’s when I realized I had something on my hands here. The preservation community I’m apart of, which is also how I got my hands on the console helped out with this process. Huge thank you to the anonymous private seller and the anonymous person who fixed the fragged exe, this whole thing has been a big rewarding experience and I’m glad people are talking about it. Also huge thank you to the person who released the build onto hidden palace. You can find the game there if you wish to play this prototype. This prototype actually got me to go buy the full game for the 360 for my retail system.

Also here is an image of that development kit this prototype came from.

 

[robertman2]

Hello,

I’m the person behind dumping this build. It was a team effort to get the exe to work as I had no part in that, but I would like to clarify some things. This build of the game came from a blue XNA Final 360 Dev Kit.

I bought the kit from a private seller and the story behind the kit is he found it many years ago in a recycling center. Thankfully he hardly ever used it and never ran any games on it, the kit was completely empty. He mainly just kept it as a display piece. I did ask him if he dumped the hard drive and he said no, so I knew that when I bought the console for my own personal homebrew creation use, I needed to dump the hard drive before I do anything. I did a network hard drive dump so I didn’t have to open the console, because this kit is in absolute pristine condition and I didn’t want to damage it.

Once the dump was done that’s when I realized I had something on my hands here. The preservation community I’m apart of, which is also how I got my hands on the console helped out with this process. Huge thank you to the anonymous private seller and the anonymous person who fixed the fragged exe, this whole thing has been a big rewarding experience and I’m glad people are talking about it. Also huge thank you to the person who released the build onto hidden palace. You can find the game there if you wish to play this prototype. This prototype actually got me to go buy the full game for the 360 for my retail system.

Also here is an image of that development kit this prototype came from.

If you actually wanna play the game, I'd grab it on PS4 or PC, I've heard the 360 version is fairly rough

 

[Decimator Omega]

If you actually wanna play the game, I'd grab it on PS4 or PC, I've heard the 360 version is fairly rough

The 360 version from my experience isn’t too bad, but I may purchase it on Steam later on. The reason why I wanted a physical copy of the game on the 360 is to mainly see how the final version for the console turned out. That and I don’t mind 30 FPS. I’ve played buggier games on the 360 so I’m no stranger to this. I do appreciate you letting me know however.