A First Look At EA's New Medal Of Honor

Here's an interesting piece of trivia about EA's new Medal of Honor: The game was fully playable from start to finish before it was even announced at Spike TV's Video Game Awards last December. That doesn't mean this, uh, modern take on warfare was anywhere near completely finished, of course, but the framework of the levels and the mechanics were all in place at that time. So with the bulk of the design work done, EA says it will spend the final year of MOH's development applying several layers of polish to an already functional game.
 
That's just the single-player portion we're talking about here, though. EA is taking the highly unorthodox approach of developing Medal of Honor's campaign and multiplayer portions at entirely different studios (EALA and DICE, respectively) and even on different engines (Unreal and Frostbite). And there won't be "exact parity" between those two components; things like run speed, aiming precision, and the feel of the weapons won't necessarily be identical across the entire game. Instead, EA says it's literally shipping "two games in a box" with the Medal of Honor name on it, and one of those games--the multiplayer--we haven't gotten to see at all yet.

But I did get to see 15 minutes of the campaign, the part that was feature-locked last December. EALA says the campaign is sitting at about a 60-percent-final level of polish, and it's already looking pretty good. It's also looking pretty familiar, set as it is in the Middle East with a team of elite operatives--you might call them tier-one operators--sneaking behind enemy lines to soften up targets of interest before larger forces can roll in and seize control of the area by extreme force.

That's what was going on in the sample mission I got to see, anyway. A number of those tier-one guys were moving stealthily through a mountain encampment, picking off Al Qaeda targets silently from the shadows. I noticed that EA isn't reluctant to put that label on your enemies in this game, nor are they shying away from saying "Hey! This game takes place in Afghanistan!" You'll notice that's a stark contrast to the innumerable shooters that have taken the generic-Middle-Eastern-company approach in the last few years.

EA is pushing a "scalpel and sledgehammer" dichotomy in Medal of Honor's campaign, referring to the precise surgical strikes of the tier-one operators, followed by the blunt force of the military. To put it in more familiar terms, you play through this campaign from the perspectives of multiple characters. Yes, the game appears to wear many of its inspirations on its sleeve. But unlike the disjointed, globetrotting storyline in Modern Warfare, MOH looks like it's making more of an effort to connect its characters through direct causation from one mission to the next.

For example, in the demo I saw, the tier-one guys had to look out for a crucial convoy of enemy trucks driving through the mountains with blinkers attached to them that were only visible with night vision. These trucks represented a critical target, so as soon as the player spotted them with the telltale blinking light, he called in an airstrike to obliterate them from the roadway. The EA guys running the demo then told me that the previous mission in the storyline was all about the squad that had been tracking the convoy in the first place, and had snuck into the enemy camp to install those blinkers on the trucks. So it seems like most or all of MOH's characters are operating in the same geographic space and will probably interact with each other more directly than in other games that use this narrative framework. You probably won't be jumping between two different continents every other mission, at least.

It's clear with Medal of Honor that EA is going after a piece of the mind-boggling enormous Call of Duty market. But then, why shouldn't they? Medal of Honor pretty much invented the cinematic military shooter as we know it, and in fact it went on to inspire and arguably even beget Call of Duty itself. Given the recent fracas at Infinity Ward, does Medal of Honor have a better chance than ever of grabbing a significant piece of the pie? It's hard to say until we get to see more of the game, but for now this here trailer is all EA's willing to show off.