It doesn't mean anything about the quality of the game. They have nothing to gain by early reviews. The people who were going to wait for a review anyway are still going to wait for a review. The people planning on buying day one are still going to buy it on day one unless they start hearing bad reviews. So what is there to gain by having a review out on or before day one?
The game is probably fine because it's built off of the previous medal of honor, which is just built off of battlefield. They'd have to fuck up real bad to make an actual bad game out of this thing. Their marketing direction shows pretty clearly that it's probably not going to be a great game either, but who knows (no one until release day evidently).
More concerning for me is this trend of withholding review copies of games. Must be incredibly frustrating for reviewers.
it's really quite simple. most games nowadays, in general, are shit. this one just happens to be shittier than the rest. there's no reason to get overly polemical and divisive about boycotting one publisher simply because they've made a career out of sucking creativity out of everything they touch... as well as being inherently evil, but that's beside the point. regardless, the politics of this industry are so fucked up anyway, i'd defy you to find one person or company who is truly "clean" from all this pervasive, marketing skullduggery. journalists included.
The responses to this thread range from rational to flat out hilarious.
The first MoH was a decent if middling game, Frostbite 2 is a proven engine, all indications are that this will be a decidedly average special-forces themed first person shooter.
There's nothing wrong with that. If it's competent, I have no problem dropping fifty bucks on something like it. The multiplayer fireteam stuff is genuinely interesting. As for the review copies? I can only guess that EA is probably banking on existing coverage through other sources - like battlelog - to drive sales harder than early review scores will.
Frankly I don't find it surprising at all. Last time, EA put so much PR behind it that they ended up getting their asses handed to them but almost every reviewer and gamer. No wonder EA wants to keep this game under heavy guard. They want to get the maximum amount of sales before reviewers get to it. If they like then no big loss to EA but if they pan it then at least they got some sales from people willing to fork over money for this game.
I think it's actually a smart decision on their part.EA knows that in a month's time this game will be sidelined and forgotten only to be mentioned back when the wholly redundant GOT discussion rear it's ugly head. They know people are craving for the new Call of Doody and the new MoH would appease that hunger is only for a short period. I mean by this point EA knows for sure they can't do anything to touch CoD so might as well ride it's wave.
Why would EA not want review scores out there, unless it's because of low confidence in the product itself. You either want reviews out there to create a ground swell of hype or you want no revews as the scores will be low enough to scare people away from buying it.
My theory is its a test to see if reviewers, or games without out review scores are relevant to their sales. Why send out copies to a bunch of reviewers who play more games than anyone? Is their opinion equal to those who only play 5-10 games a year and are the target market for the game? IMO thats smart business. If they sell 3-5 million you are not going to see reviews early ever again from EA, and possibly other publishers. I have no problem with that.
That's quite interesting, I'll watch as a spectator on the sidelines how this goes down.
I say people should vote with their wallet. If there's no review on day 1 then don't buy the game until you see a review and if the review is a good enough reason to buy it. Most likely this will mess up EA's day 1 sales and they will have no numbers to report on.
Or this will make a turn for the worse and EA will just close down the studio for not making enough sales on day 1. Either way, someone is fucked.
I find it funny people are now losing their minds over "how can you make a game depicting war and make it fun?!?!" Where were you guys throughout the 80s and 90s, where we constantly depicted war in fun games? It's okay for me to lay waste to Viet Cong with a light machine gun but shooting Al Qaeda with an assault rifle is war profiteering? I dunno, dude.
Same thing with the real guns. It is not the first (or last). When real guns started appearing in games, we all thought it was cool. Now it's profiteering.
I feel like Jeff does about; it'll be _fine_, it won't blow the doors off or be outright horrible.
@altairre: Holy shit they licensed Captain Price for this game?
Oh yeah and that looks exactly like the kind of stupidity you'd find in a CoD campaign, I don't see why anyone would complain about that and spin around and say CoD is great instead.
The first Medal of Honor game was actually pretty fucking great all round.
Vor ist ein papier?
Ah Senor Spielbergo's finest work, I still remember local multiplayer, if you enter SSPIELBERG at the password screen you unlock a velociraptor dinosaur for multiplayer mode.
It's okay for me to lay waste to Viet Cong with a light machine gun but shooting Al Qaeda with an assault rifle is war profiteering?
To play Devil's Advocate for a moment; the previous MOH game attempted to sell itself on authenticity while this one opens with a cavalcade of explosions before dumping you into a terrorist compound for the tutorial, in which you gun-down training targets in a makeshift airplane. It's not war profiteering but it's definitely tacky and almost kitsch in its attempts to be "shocking."
But in the same medium, we have stuff like Metal Gear Solid and Tom Cahlancy's, where they go to painstaking lengths to make sure that the guns are modelled correctly and they consult with futurists and they look at declassified documents and learn the proper jargon and model the equipment exactly right; and then go on to have completely nuts stories where the President is in danger but also the President is evil and the defends grid is in the hands of rogue agents and you've got to use evil methods for the greater good and blah blah blah.
I'm sure if you asked the teams making those games, they'd say they're trying to be authentic too, even as they produce their action movie scripts. The only difference is MoH has the biggest, and thus most unpopular game genre and setting. I think people are just looking for an excuse to justify not liking the genre, rather than just going "genre's played out and not for me anymore". Instead of that they go "they're war profiteering and being shady!"
it will probably still be better than mw3s single player, i just finished that yesterday and have forgotten pretty much all but two things that happened in that game.
@rebgav agreed on both accounts. Beyond expectation management I'd say rampant confirmation bias is one of the things that keep video game enthusiasts perpetually angry.
Many comments already touched this subject but I still find it kind of amusing how MoH gets the ass-kicking CoD should have gotten all that time. I don't see the game being anything else than a mediocre or maybe even respectable entry in a genre that is inevitably very close to being pure gun porn and distorting war into a cool, fun action activitiy.
I don't think all of that shit is particularly gentlemanly at all but I have enjoyed parts of it once upon a time (MoH1 and the even better CoD1) and don't really mind kids indulging in the same idiocy I did. This internet outrage reeks of herd mentality and a telling desperation to prove just how fucking grown-up one wishes to be. If you truly wanted a 'real' take on the horrors of war you'd have so much else to do than shit your pants because of another generic modern military FPS. I hope the game gets it's fair assessment in the end despite shit marketing, whiny nerds and questionable review practices.
Until then I'll still have my fingers crossed for that game that has you explore a goddamn warzone as a single parent protecting a child, a civilian doctor treating mutilated victims, a war journalist or whoever else that isn't a fucking cowboy gunning down hundreds and being a supposed badass.
Also that patch is insane. But at least it is more realistic than CoD and not totally cliche-ridden right?
Oh well.
That setpiece looked kind of okay.. but the gameplay looked pretty terrible..
That set piece looks cool! I think this game will be fine, I really enjoyed the last Medal of Honor for some unknown reason so I'm sort of excited for this one
Has anyone been playing the game? How is it? Im one of the fewenjoyed the first ones campaign. Not really the multiplayer ( I'm more of a battlefield person compared to the quick cod style) but I thought that campaign had some really cool moments. Sure the scripting was messed up in spots but that's easy to get over because video games
I wouldn't have sent out reviews for it, either. Even after the patch it is buggy as shit. I have hit a point in the game where I finish a car escape sequence in dubai and as soon as I am dragged out of my car by some locals, the game crashes. I kill the process, start over, do the entire game segment again. Crash in the same place. Also, every time you go to a cut-scene, it pops out to the desktop and goes to windows mode and hangs for awhile. Then jumps back into the cut-scene/game. Also, the scripting is just as half-assed as in the last game. Characters walk through objects. If a certain point in an environment is hit, everyone just vanishes. I was at one point with three guys on the field in front of me and we were engaging in a firefight... and someone walked past the right spot or something and . . . all the enemies just vanished. Like ghosts. Even the guy right in front of me who was charging at me.
I wouldn't call that super shady at all, just EA not having much confidence in it's game, it happens all the time in hollywood. I mean if anything, that's the closest a company is going to get to saying "Just... don't bother with this", so I appreciate their honesty.
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