The shooter genre is rather overloaded at present, with Call Of Duty and Battlefield providing the focus around which other, smaller titles congregate. Everybody wants a piece of the action, which means an abundance of average games.
I’d say the Medal Of Honor reboot from 2010 fits that description. It wasn’t a bad game, and I rather enjoyed the short story mode while it lasted. The online modes weren’t without merit either, but I soon traipsed back to CoD.
EA didn’t let poor critical and commercial responses throw it off course though, with Medal Of Honor: Warfighter due to be released in the coming months. It’s unlikely this will be the last Medal Of Honor game either, according to what Frank Gibeau had to say during the company’s Q1 earnings call.
“With regards to Medal of Honor, we brought the brand back a couple of years ago in 2010 with the goal of building a sustainable long-term franchise that was positioned around the authentic experience of being in combat. And we were very proud of the first product. It definitely delivered on a lot of fronts. In a couple of fronts, it didn’t.”
“We weren’t as pleased with the quality as we had hoped to be. And our goal with this version was to change things up a bit. We changed the tech base from the Unreal Engine to the Frostbite engine. We added some resources from our DICE Studio in Stockholm. And we’ve tried some very innovative things this time around with multiplayer and some other things.”
“So we’re tracking to grow the franchise from the prior version, the 2010 version. And our goal is to continue to have Medal of Honor as part of our portfolio going forward.”
It sounds like Warfighter is going to be a definite improvement on the first game, and that there will be more titles to come in the future. The question is whether there is room for another big FPS franchise at this stage.
