Bad role of the DICE
By Hooded 51 Comments
Am I alone in thinking that DICE's contribution to the new Medal of Honor is a bit half-assed? The multiplayer side of the game looks really poor, I feel its a little bit rushed. I've only played a little bit of Medal of Honor but when I sat down and played the game I found just found problem and problem. Many graphical and animation glitches including stuttering and clipping.
I put the majority of this down to the Frostbite game engine, which is used for the multiplayer side of Medal of honor while the singleplayer section of the game is Unreal 3 engine. Frostbite is the in-house developed engine DICE have created, Since the Frostbite engine debuted with Battlefield Bad Company, me and the Frostbite engine have had a deep cold hatred for one another. I find the engine very sluggish, unresponsive and imprecise. I'm sure many people have different preferences and prefer a more slower methodical first person shooter. However the controls feel far too loose to make the game enjoyable for me. Medal of Honor multiplayer doesn't allow players to go prone (Lay on the floor) but when in the single player part of the game it perfectly allows you to do so. I can't see why DICE choose not to implement going prone into Medal of Honor but not just MoH, but the Battlefield Bad Company games. Its quite an important but simple ability and without being able to worm around on the floor, it just feels like they've taken away your knees from beneath you, all pun fully intended.
So i've covered the game engine and the problems that I find, but DICE really fail in more ways than one. DICE have released six games on the Xbox 360, five of which have had online multiplayer, the other being Mirrors Edge. One of those five games was Battlefield 1943, an online only multiplayer Xbox Live Arcade game. So you would think DICE have multiplayer locked down, right? Well no they don't. When DICE released Bad Company on the xbox 360 it was plagued with server problems, whether they be showing the wrong victory / defeat screen at the end of games. The servers loosing packs of information on a regular basis, you could log in the game and somehow your character has lost levels. Horrible lag when playing especially when trying to melee someone and worst of all not being able to log into the servers completely, this has been a major issue for every DICE game on the release day. I'm pretty confident that this weekend once Medal of Honor has sold enough copies worldwide and people sit down to play on a Saturday afternoon, the servers wont be able to hold. Its happen every DICE release and has now led me to wait a few weeks before even
contemplating picking up a DICE developed game so soon.
If you haven't guessed it yet, i'm a major Call of Duty fan, for many reasons I prefer Call of Duty to many other shooters out there and I wont go into much detail, Call of Duty has had its problems in the past but most importantly they have learnt from them, something I cant say for DICE. The controls of Call of Duty are very tight, precise and consistant throughout the singleplayer and multiplayer. I'm not the kind of player who just plays Call of duty and nothing else, I play many games and play nearly almost every shooter. So I know what sort of shooter I like. I really had high hopes for Medal of Honor, as I've been a major fan of the previous Medal of Honor games in the series.
I can see only two ways the next Medal of Honor can improve, if EA feel the need to make another one.
1. They can dump DICE as the multiplayer developers, let them continue on any other Battlefield, Mirrors Edge and Need for Speed games they are currently working on and they can allow the singleplayer devs (Danger Close) to develop the Multiplayer aswell.
or
2. Dump DICE as above and allow Respawn Entertainment (former Infinity Ward heads and some developers) to develop the multiplayer. Rather than EA possibly have 3 modern day shooters (Battlefield, Medal of Honor and whatever Respawn Entertainment are working on). Coming from IW, Respawn know how to make a shooter than truely can take on Call of Duty.
It's quite known that because DICE developed the Multiplayer of Medal of Honor, its very simular to Battlefield but with a few tweaks to aim it towards the Call of Duty audience. As Jeff says it puts MoH in an awkward position where its not quite satisfying either market, the its not like Battlefield enough and its no where near Call of Duty enough.
I know it's a long post so i'll expect to see "TLDR" posts lol and i've posted it in a Medal of Honor forum, so theres going to be a few fans, so i'm willing to take a few hits of fanboys, but I hope someone can share their thoughts and have a conversation. Especially as I had to write this out twice, because of this. Also its my first Blog Post.