MachineGames Quietly Starts Early Work On Wolfenstein 3

Somewhere in Uppsala, actors are reading for a role that officially doesn’t exist. On February 26, 2026, the outlet MP1st surfaced a casting call for a project codenamed Valkyrie, and the crew attached to it isn’t a guessing game. Performance Director Tom Keegan just came off Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Casting Director Emily Schweber has staffed every Wolfenstein game since The New Order launched in 2014. Bethesda hasn’t confirmed any of it. It hasn’t had to.

The casting sheet names a new character, Sofiya, a Ukrainian orphan between eight and eleven who travels with a dog called Ralph and slowly attaches herself to series lead William “B.J.” Blazkowicz. Performance capture reportedly starts in April 2026, with more sessions stretching into 2027, according to VGC’s writeup of the leak. That’s a production schedule, not a rumor with no legs behind it.

How do we know MachineGames actually started Wolfenstein 3?

The paper trail goes back further than February. On January 7, 2026, Kotaku reported that Wolfenstein 3 was already in development at MachineGames, the Swedish studio behind 2017’s The New Colossus and 2024’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Windows Central’s Jez Corden had flagged the same rumor independently. Neither outlet named a release window, but both agreed the game was real and tied to a bigger push from parent company Bethesda to treat Wolfenstein the way it’s currently treating Fallout.

Outlets like EGW have followed the story since that first January report, cataloguing each new leak and casting document as it surfaced. By now the pattern is hard to miss: every fresh detail lines up with the last one instead of contradicting it, which is rarely how a false rumor survives seven months of scrutiny.

Has MachineGames actually talked about finishing the trilogy?

This isn’t the first time studio director Jerk Gustafsson has hinted at it. In a Noclip documentary released in September 2025, he described The New Order and The New Colossus as always being planned as the first two parts of a trilogy, saying the team had mapped out Blazkowicz’s full arc back during the earliest days of development at id Software. He stopped short of confirming a third game outright, but he didn’t leave much room for a different reading either. Months later, GamesIndustry.biz reported a similarly direct comment from Gustafsson, who said returning to Wolfenstein and finishing the story the studio had planned from the start had always been the intention. Coming from the studio’s own director, that’s close to an admission without an actual press release attached to it.

What is Valkyrie, and who is Sofiya?

MachineGames has never used the codename Valkyrie in public, and the studio has stayed quiet since the casting details leaked. Fans have already started drawing comparisons the studio probably didn’t want made this early. On a ResetEra thread built around the MP1st report, one commenter questioned whether a gunplay-first franchise like Wolfenstein could “tank a Last of Us-style child hanger-on NPC” without slowing the pace down, a fair worry, given how differently Naughty Dog and MachineGames have historically structured their games. Sofiya’s actual role in the story is still guesswork. Her presence in a real casting document, tied to two crew members who already worked together on Indiana Jones, is not.

Why is the timing tied to Amazon’s Wolfenstein show?

Bethesda’s parent company has watched Amazon turn Fallout into one of Prime Video’s bigger bets, with a second season out and a third already greenlit. In July 2025, Variety reported that Amazon was developing a Wolfenstein series through the same production company, Kilter Films, run by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. MachineGames studio director Jerk Gustafsson is attached as an executive producer alongside showrunner Patrick Somerville, whose credits include Station Eleven. Lining up a new mainline game with a streaming adaptation is close to the playbook Bethesda already ran with Fallout around the show’s 2024 premiere.

Is MachineGames working on anything else at the same time?

Wolfenstein 3 doesn’t appear to be the only project on the studio’s plate. Notebookcheck reported in January 2026 that MachineGames is also building a multiplayer title described as similar in structure to Rainbow Six Siege, running in parallel with Valkyrie. That would be a real departure for a studio that has built its reputation almost entirely on single-player campaigns, and it may explain why Bethesda hasn’t rushed to confirm either project before both are further along.

When could Wolfenstein 3 actually come out?

Performance capture alone typically runs a year or more before a game reaches its final stretch, and MachineGames has already gone nearly a decade since The New Colossus in 2017 without a new mainline Wolfenstein release, filling the gap with 2019’s Youngblood and its detour into Indiana Jones. If the April 2026 capture schedule holds and sessions genuinely run into 2027, a release before 2028 looks unlikely. Bethesda will also want the launch sitting close to the Amazon series, whenever that finally gets a premiere date of its own. There’s also chatter about where the game lands outside PC and Xbox. Every mainline Wolfenstein entry since 2014 has eventually reached Nintendo hardware, so a Switch 2 version isn’t a stretch, though nothing from Bethesda backs that up yet.

For now, B.J. Blazkowicz’s next chapter exists mostly in casting documents, community threads picking the leak apart, and studio credits nobody was supposed to notice yet. Going by how the last decade of Wolfenstein leaks has played out, that is usually exactly how these games surface first.