Morning Save Point: Wolfenstein 3 Is Real, Halo Gets Firefight, and More

Friday morning, and Xbox spent its 25th anniversary weekend handing out announcements. The headline is that Wolfenstein 3 is real and in production, more than the franchise has given anyone in years. Also on the board: id Software is already deep into its next game, the Halo remake is getting Firefight for free, and 21 original Xbox games are suddenly playable on PC. Xbox Live was still having a bad morning, the Switch 2 gets a Black Friday bundle next week, and with GTA 6 six days away every other date this month is measured against it.

The big one

Wolfenstein 3 is in production. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced it on November 12, 2026, in a post carrying two photographs. “Wolfenstein 3 is officially in production at @MachineGames,” she wrote, calling it “one of gaming’s most important franchises.” MachineGames confirmed it a few minutes later with six words: “His reputation precedes him. Wolfenstein 3 is in production.” That line refers to the first photograph, a script page headed “Chapter 01” and “INT. THE INTERROGATION CELL.” The stage direction has a table clock a couple of minutes before twelve, BJ leaning in close to Otto, and Otto’s reply landing in German before the English “Not him.” The second photograph is two actors in motion capture suits, hands flat on a table, in a studio lined with camera rigs.

What is missing matters as much as what is there. There is no release date, no platform list, no trailer, and still no Wolfenstein 3 page on the Steam store. IGN reports that the pair in the capture studio are Brian Bloom, who plays B.J. Blazkowicz, and Debra Wilson, who plays Grace Walker, both returning. Studio head Jerk Gustafsson told Noclip last year that the team had always pictured BJ’s story as a trilogy, and the series was put on hold while MachineGames built Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The franchise is also being developed as an Amazon television series, and Xbox’s anniversary celebration lands on Sunday, November 15.

For players this is a status, not a product, and the script page is the only real information anybody has. As an example, the first chapter gives you the room, the clock and the fear, which is more than most announcements bother with. MachineGames did not announce Wolfenstein 3 to sell a logo, it announced it because the work is happening, and the capture rig in the photo proves it. The missing part is the one players shop around, a window and a platform list, so the next thing to watch is Xbox’s anniversary event on Sunday, November 15.

Also happening

• id Software is already working on its next game. The Doom studio answered Sharma with a post of its own, calling the project “a new game from our teams in Texas and Frankfurt, with game direction once again by Hugo Martin.” No title, no platforms, and “it’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more.”
• Halo: Campaign Evolved is getting Firefight, and it is free. The four-player cooperative PvE mode arrives in a free update this winter. Xbox FanFest attendees played it first on new maps, and Halo Studios says more detail comes at Halo Fest on December 12 and 13 in Seattle, where it will be playable all weekend. Seattle is already Halo territory: the Great Journey exhibition runs at the city’s Museum of Pop Culture through May 16, 2027.
• Twenty-one original Xbox games reached PC today. Microsoft’s backward compatibility program on PC now covers 25 titles, from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Four games have achievements for the first time ever: KOTOR, KOTOR II, BLiNX: The Time Sweeper and Conker: Live and Reloaded. It needs Windows 11, and mouse and keyboard now work in all of them.
• Nintendo’s Black Friday deals start November 22. The Switch 2 and Mario Kart World bundle drops to $499.99, a $50 saving, through December 5, and a Switch 2 with Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is $529.99. Select games are $20 off from November 22 to 29, and the eShop sale runs November 19 to December 2. We have mapped PlayStation’s side of the same sale as well.
• Microsoft marked Xbox’s 25th with a letter from Sharma. It says Xbox has built four generations of consoles with a fifth on the way, and that 111 people across Xbox and its studios with 25 years of service are each getting an engraved console.

Out today

Friday is light, but here is what lands.

Menes: The Chainbreaker is an Egyptian-inspired action-adventure about parries and flight, built over three years in Romania by one developer, and it supports Xbox Play Anywhere. Our Release Calendar carries the rest of the list.

Deal of the day

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is 80% off at $7.99 on Steam, down from $39.99, and the discount ends on November 18. It launched on October 27, 2016, and Steam still lists its Metacritic score at 74. Eight dollars buys a very long weekend.

One more thing

The Xbox letter remembers the beginning. Before Microsoft had a console, it had a game: in 1979 it shipped Microsoft Adventure, a text-based adventure written by Gordon Letwin, one of the company’s first 13 employees, which Sharma’s letter says looked more like MS-DOS than an early Minecraft. The original Xbox launched in 2001 with a hard drive and dual analog sticks, when 9 in 10 American households were still on dial-up.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report