What is the point of Medal of Honor Warfighter? Why does it exist?
A cynic might suggest that the game’s main function is to fill the gap between Electronic Arts’ two-yearly Battlefield releases, to both replicate Activision’s Call of Duty model of annual launches and to keep the pressure on first-person shooting’s runaway market-leader.
Perhaps the Medal of Honor of 2012 is merely a historical relic of the glories of 1999, when Steven Spielberg’s original wowed PlayStation owners and brought blistering World War II cinematic action to gaming. That original shooter was an explosive moment, but after endless spin-offs and sequels, the Medal of Honor battleship began to feel less like a roaring USS Arkansas and more like a lifeboat, half-empty, drifting in the gray waters of the mid-2000s.
Danger Close, Warfighter’s developer, is desperate to show that its new game is different. The Los Angeles-developer wants to prove that its work has a creative and entertainment purpose that’s greater than filling the shelves of GameStop with yet another box with a moody-looking guy cradling an assault rifle.
Medal of Honor Warfighter is set in the modern day. On a first pass this is hardly cause for jubilation, simply because modern shooting is a genre so played-out that even Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has skipped right from the Nixon era to the near-future just to avoid the jam-packed combat-zone known as ‘right now’.
And yet, there is cause for confidence. Here are five ways Medal of Honor Warfighter is trying to stand out from all those other bro-shooters.
First is this idea of the authenticity of living life as top-tier soldier, right now, in the modern world. Here and now is a familiar location to us. The setting allows us to focus on the emotional lives of the protagonists, rather than goggling at cool retro gear or futuristic hover-drones.
Danger Close wants Warfighter to put the player in the boots of the soldier. Studio head Greg Goodrich says, “At the highest level, Medal of Honor is a story about a community. A story about the individuals who are doing things on our behalf overseas and sacrificing.
“Over the last four years, we've had the privilege of spending a lot of time with these guys. We get a real sense of the types of human beings these people are. They have the same sort of worries as you or me, paying bills, family. But then they flip that switch between who they are as humans and who they are as operators, and these superheroes go and do extraordinary things”
Trailers show the single-player campaign’s main character Preacher returning to his family, coping with the emotional disconnection many combat veterans find. There’s a moment in the campaign trailer when, sitting in a hospital bed, he looks extremely vulnerable, sad. Compare this with the piss-n-vinegar grizzled rage of Frank Woods in the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 trailers.
Of course, games are increasingly emboldened to investigate the meaning of military violence, as seen in the shreddingly tense third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line earlier this summer. That said, the themes of hard choices, self-serving justifications and severe mental stress explored in Spec Ops are unlikely to be touched in Warfighter, which is concerned more with the the nexus between the ordinary and the extraordinary lives of elite military personnel. In short, the sort of thing that will likely play well to the people it portrays.
This opens up a whole slew of potential problems, particularly for a game that must, by necessity, sell itself to the so-called ‘bro-dudes’ who cannot be easily imagined caring an old fig for Mrs. Preacher’s loneliness and despair.
Insofar as the coast of Somalia is any less exotic to most of us than the dungeons of Tamriel, Warfighter is set in a world that we ‘know’. The game portrays soldiers from liberal democracies fighting insurgents from (and in) countries hostile to what most of us would recognize as ‘Western Values’. The bad guys are, as Goodrich puts it, “those nasty bastards that are out there doing horrible things”.
He adds, “The game focuses on something that is very real, real threats. The locations and the threats and the operations, it all has a connective tissue, a dotted line of things that we're all faced with on a daily basis. So the game narrative is these guys doing what they do to track down these networks, shut these networks down, neutralize the threat, and keep this nasty, nasty sh*t off our shores.”
Looking at the big shooters this fall, Medal of Honor may actually have found a niche. Call of Duty is set in the near future (and the recent past). Halo 4 and Borderlands 2 are sci-fi epics.
Of course, you have to take the idea of ‘realism’ in a game with a pinch of salt. But setting the game in actual hotspots gives it a distinct personality, an appeal to a certain kind of temperament, in much the same way that Tom Clancy readers are not the same as Bernard Cornwell fans, even though both enjoy military fiction.
There are historical reasons why multiplayer in this game focuses on ‘blue-on-blue’ combat between allied soldiery, but let’s get to that in a moment.
First of all, Warfighter allows you to play as a Tier One operative from ten different nations, such as the UK’s SAS, or U.S SEAL or Polish GROM or the South Korean UDT. This is simultaneously both kind of neat and kind of dumb.
On the one hand, as has previously been noted on IGN, it is cool to be playing as ‘your’ country against similarly patriotic boneheads from other countries. EA says it is taking a leaf out of FIFA's book in this respect, allowing players to define themselves according to their allegiances.
Undoubtedly, it is interesting to experience the tone, weaponry and uniforms of the different solders from good-guy armed forces and to test them against one another.
The multiplayer campaign is an unproven entity at this point, but E3 gave us a generally positive experience, with the variety of classes, weapons and extras promising much. Each country’s basic class feels and plays very differently. There were six available at E3, with a total of 72 unlockable in the final game.
But also, yeah, it’s strange to be playing a modern game in which Canadians are shooting at Australians and Americans are shooting at Brits. In the real world, something this game seeks to portray, my country of Britain and the United States haven’t been fighting since we redecorated the White House back in 1812. Unless my history knowledge has gone badly awry, Canadians and Australians have never seen a good reason to go at it. Assuming the UN steers clear of major Canuck/Aussie crisis-points, such as 'which is best, cricket or ice-hockey?', things are likely to stay that way.
Goodrich says, “When a president, a prime minister, a head of state has a problem that needs to be solved, there's a phone that individual can pick up and call a group of hard-hitting individuals to go solve that problem for them. We looked at that, and the competitive spirit that comes with it. It's actually based on reality. These groups do cross-train, and they do work with and sometimes against one another to try to better themselves. So that was the whole spirit around the creation of the blue-on-blue multinational multiplayer.”
There is another unusual facet to Warfighter, that being multiplayer being built around a buddy system, in which players are paired off with team-mates and encouraged through gameplay advantages to help each other out. This is very much in keeping with the real military ethos of protecting the other guy’s back, but how far it catches the yen of multiplayer warriors is an unknown.
So, in multiplayer, no-one plays as the bad guys, the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Largely, this blue-on-blue thing is a fix that dates back to Medal of Honor 2010 when players could originally take on the role of Taliban fighters, something that caused a furore among politicians and war-veterans.
Goodrich is in no hurry to return to that kind of media firestorm. “I remember lying in my bed at night looking at my ceiling, thinking, 'God, what have we done?' Even though as gamers we look at it very differently. I'm not embodying the beliefs and values of the enemy. I'm just suiting up and I'm playing. But I can't go on TV and I can't debate with a Gold Star mom. You can't do that. You just have to look at her and say, ‘I'm sorry for your loss’.” In the last game, the Taliban were renamed as ‘Opposing Force’.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that the media will find fault with a game in which allies are shooting at one another. Goodrich acknowledges the problem of creating a game that’s placed in the world where people fight and die, as opposed to one that exists only in the imagination. “There's that added pressure of getting it right and making sure you're applying the proper amount of respect and care to make sure you're not leaving a bad taste in anyone's mouth. For us, working with the guys, we want to get that tone correct and make sure that those core tenets of honor, respect, and a reverence for that community still ring true in what we do.”
The mainstream media is way more interested in how videogames portray real events, than how they imagine intergalactic armageddons or fantasy showdowns between orcs and elves. Controversy may be something that EA wants to avoid, but the company's PR Corps won't say no to press coverage of a shooting game with a heart.
In 2010, EA rebooted Medal of Honor as a modern shooter, leaving behind its Saving Private Ryan roots. The game was okay, ranking in the mid-70s on Metacritic. IGN was disappointed with the attempts at character development, stability issues and an abundance of scripted scenes. It sold over six million units, certainly enough for profitability.
Curiously, that game was half-built by Danger Close using Unreal Engine 3, with multiplayer handled by DICE, using Frostbite. The new game is entirely Danger Close’s affair, the company that has, in one guise or another, been making Medal of Honor games for 15 years.
It is using the Frostbite engine and, yes, the game does look really, really good. Whether the extra time working with the engine will allow Danger Close to get more out of Frostbite 2 than DICE did with Battlefield 3 remains to be seen. Frostbite is DICE’s creation although, of course, Danger Close will have enjoyed the input of Patrick Soderlund, executive vice president for EA Games and formerly head of DICE.
Goodrich says, “It all starts with a great game, a core game. And believe me, we've spent a lot of time making sure that it's a slick first-person shooter with responsive controls and great through-the-gun, second-to-second, minute-to-minute gameplay. We have that more mature storyline, but we absolutely satiate that craving for shooter gameplay and fun.
“At the end of the day, yes, we are a first-person shooter and we have to fulfill that. It's one game of many parts.”
Colin Campbell is a British-born, Santa-Cruz based games journalist, working for IGN. You can contact me via Twitter or IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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