One of the main staff at Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Wolfenstein: Youngblood developer MachineHead Games has talked up the game’s portrayal of Nazi killing, and how modern audiences are reacting to the game.

Senior game director Andreas Öjerfors – who worked on Wolfenstein: Youngblood – has expressed dismay that they feel people find fighting Nazis “problematic.”

The quote comes via PC Games Insider, when they spoke to Öjerfors at Gamescom 2019. In short he says it is “weird and disappointing,” and that the story was never intended to be relevant.

Öjerfors also claims some people expressed feeling uncomfortable fighting the game’s major villains:

“It’s incredibly weird and disappointing. We never meant for our stories to be relevant, we wanted to tell great, interesting stories to the best of our abilities.

“But then, when we started to talk about Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, we started to get comment online about the theme of the game, fighting the Nazis. Somehow some people felt that was problematic, which is just incredibly disappointing. We’ve seen an increase of right-wing extremism in the Western world. We see that online to a great degree. Right-wing extremists are great at affecting the debate online. And of course, maybe they abused us to whip up some anger when we were making Wolfenstein II.”

MachineHead Games worked alongside Arkane Studios to make Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and have been involved with the series since its 2014 reboot with Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is out now on Windows PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One. It is also coming soon to Stadia. In case you missed it, you can find our review here.