Medal of Honor: On Point or Dishonorable?

Dogged by development issues and mired in controversy, EA’s reboot of its once illustrious Medal of Honor franchise is looking to take on Call of Duty and Halo, the twin titans of online shooters, in this Fall’s gaming charts. Can it possibly hope to succeed?

Okay, quick gaming history recap time: in 1998, following the renewed interest in World War II created by Saving Private Ryan’s release, EA launched a new series of first person shooters, titled Medal of Honor. They met with great critical and commercial success, particularly the third installment in the series, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, acclaimed for its gritty authenticity, stirring scripted sequences and stunning set-pieces that redefined the FPS genre.

EA, however, managed to fall out spectacularly with the developers of Allied Assault, who upped and left to form their own studio: Infinity Ward. They took their previous game’s blueprint to rival publisher Activision, titled the new series Call of Duty and met with ever greater success. When they moved the setting from the now over-crowded WWII scene to the modern day, Call of Duty went supernova, becoming arguably the biggest console franchise on the planet. EA, meanwhile, kept plugging away with Medal of Honor games, with ever diminishing returns.

Fast forward to today. Activision managed to fall out spectacularly with the developers of Modern Warfare 2, and EA sniffed an opportunity to get back in the game by updating Medal of Honor to a modern setting. Unlike the Modern Warfare games, which tiptoed ’round current events in the Middle East, EA set the new MoH smack dab in the middle of the ongoing Afghanistan conflict, kicking up a huge amount of controversy in the process.

EA, of course, would argue videogames have as much right to deal with modern conflicts as any other media – after all, if The Hurt Locker can win Oscars for its portrayal of the soldier’s experience in Iraq, why can’t our medium also represent the pressure and horror of life on Afghanistan’s front-line in a far more interactive way?

Medal of Honor’s Single Player Campaign is set around a series of operations in Afghanistan conducted by “Tier 1″ military specialists in 2002. EA went to great pains to emphasize their consultations with American troops and their families, both over the game’s content and the resulting effect it has on the player. The publisher has publicly stated that Medal of Honor is powered by the men and women of the United States military forces serving in hostile territories with a realistic depiction of what they face on a day-to-day basis.

But as Konami found out with the outcry and subsequent cancellation of their game Six Days in Fallujah, many people are not ready for the very intense interactive nature of games that reflect still-ongoing conflicts. Just over a week before the game’s release, EA released a statement that stated one of the multiplayer sides available in the game had been renamed from “The Taliban” to the euphemistic “Opposing Force”, citing reactions from the families of American servicemen and women to the idea of players taking the role of the real-life opposition to the U.S. forces. The fact the game itself must have been ready to ship long before EA’s announcement has led many to suggest EA deliberately sought the publicity of a controversial reaction to the game.

Of course, if the game is fantastic this wouldn’t be an issue, but Medal of Honor has been dogged by development issues and terrible previews. The former have not been helped by EA’s unusual decision to split the Single Player and Multiplayer sections of the game between two different studios. New studio Danger Close created the SP Campaign in a version of Epic’s Unreal 3 engine, while renowned Battlefield developers DICE handled the Multiplayer portion, utilizing their own Frostbite engine. The result is a game of two halves, which at times look markedly different from each other.

After Battlefield: Bad Company 2′s success, EA must have thought putting DICE in charge of the online modes was a no-brainer. They were even confident enough to release a public beta on consoles earlier this year, a decision that proved a massive marketing mistake. The gaming public is now accustomed to public betas – thanks to the Halo series – being essentially highly polished demos of the full game. They certainly weren’t prepared for the frequently unplayable mess that was the Medal of Honor beta, which was filled with bugs, limited and uninteresting gameplay and a strangely arcade-like feel, far from the realism EA promised. The PC beta, released only last week, did little to persuade anyone these issues have been fixed. With online multiplayer now being the major battleground between console shooters, Medal of Honor appears to be in serious trouble.

This would be a shame. With Activision seemingly determined to milk the Call of Duty franchise from every possible angle, even after the departure of its main creative forces, gamers are crying out for an alternative. It’s possible EA may pull this one out of the bag and resurrect the MoH brand to its former glory, but up against Halo: Reach and Black Ops? The signs are pointing to MISSION FAILED.