Brilliant.

Medal of Honor Warfighter is developer Danger Close’s second try at rebooting EA’s venerable but moribund military franchise.

Its Medal of Honor reboot in 2010 landed with a thud in its attempts to tell an in-medias-res story of real life military operations in Afghanistan in the Shahakot mountains. Medal of Honor Warfighter aims to tell its own fictionalized account of supposedly real events.


Danger Close purports to have nobler goals than just another war story. It's talked at length about their quest for authenticity, if not realism.


Very little of it shows in the final product. Medal of Honor Warfighter fails in almost every regard. Warfighter’s campaign is a jumble of flashy parts that Danger Close unsuccessfully tries to glue together, and the solid foundation of its multiplayer is buried under a broken interface, small maps and poor interface design

...and people are still seriously still considering paying money for this?

EA's Peter Moore talking to Eurogamer: "It's a great game. It's a great studio. It's a great franchise. The genre continues to be hot. We built great multiplayer."

Clearly he, and the QA department, have not played a stitch of this. If, after the predicted poor sales, they drop the studio, these words should haunt him into a shallow grave.

"My expectations are it will sell well"

As BF3 and the success of Premium continues to multiply, any hopes of MoH being a hit will have mattered less. With Premium alone, 1.5 million forty pounds buries a lot of shit game.

Strikes me that the military FPS is the worst possible genre to require reform. Whether it's CODified gameplay or not, it requires graphical fidelity/"realism" which costs $$$$$. It's also a genre which over the lat few years seems to have come to need to get into bed with the military a little, which also seems to limit the stories that get told.

Spec Ops obviously didn't have the budget it needed, so the gameplay and graphics are only serviceable, and it had MP tacked on.

Seems like the chances of an enaging game, with slightly more cereberal play and a solid story that doesn't look and play like pish would require a dev to throw lots of money at it and go against all the indicators of what actually sells. Wondering how someone might do an "arthouse" military FPS, and/or whether someone like an EA would use BF3 money to kind of drag up smaller "for the love of it" titles. Or maybe I'm transposing a film industry model on to something that it doesn't quite fit.

Erm......I like it. Not as much as the last game, but more than any of the last CoDs. MP is rough, ready and tactical. Different enough from CoD and BF to find a small market.

If any other PS3 owners are finding this a guilty pleasure, in the face of constant and IMO, unjust,  criticism, let me know. I want the trophy for winning a round online with a friend.....

Yet it still hits no.1. Sums up the state of the military FPS right now, and the type of grade A idiot that will throw forty notes at any hackneyed attempt, why should devs try harder, why should pubs demand better?

Webbins wrote:

grade A idiot that will throw forty notes at any hackneyed attempt,

Thanks for the input. I'm still enjoying it. Single player isn't quite as involving as the previous game but still leagues above the Modern Warfare  trilogy and the least said about Bf3's utterly dreadful campaign the better. Like the last MoH, it also ends emotionally and involves the player in a way that no other genre member has managed. I'm also enjoying multiplayer but I don't see this as a CoD clone in the slightest. It reminds me more of Rainbow 6 or GRAW in first person. Rough around the edges, but at least interesting. I see Edge's problem though. It's damned hard reviewing games when your head is so far up your arse after all.

Edge:
These sequences are everything you’d expect from a driving section shoehorned into an FPS: clunky, a chore, and overlong. At least your car has regenerating health.

lol

The driving sections are fun and a damned site better than anything in CoD. Like playing a section of Patriot Games or Ronin.

The second one is far better, mainly because it has distinct sections and doesn't outstay it's welcome, as you say.

The problem I have with most reviews is that they all seem to be labouring the technical problems of the pre patch game they were given (which is EA's mistake) but failing to give mention, even in a review like Edge's, published a good 5 days post patch, that most of these technical issues have been resolved. 

My other problem is the constant comparison to CoD. I find myself completely opposed to Edge's viewpoint. This is, for me personally, a solid 7/10 that could creep up to an 8 if more work goes into the multiplayer. Modern Warfare 3, on the other hand, was a horrible xenophobic jingoistic 3/10 yet edge thought it worthy of a 9. I thought the single player was plain awful, with control constantly wrestled away from you just as things seemed to be getting interesting (they never did), only for the controls to be given back just in time for yet another bloody over the top set piece. It was gaming's answer to a Michael Bay movie, and those are all shit. The last MoH was more akin to a Chris Ryan novel, this is more Tom Clancy. It still has it's facts right, it still stays rooted in the real world, but it's one downside in plotting is to try and tie all these real life special forces missions up together into one plot. It doesn't pull it off. The previous games active warzone with the flitting between the Rangers, Tier 1 units and Apache was far more consistent. But it comes away with its integrity intact, which is more than CoD has done since the first Modern Warfare, and I can't begin tell you how much I detested Black Ops' campaign, never mind the vacuous Modern Warfare sequels (I'll leave out a No Russian debate, but that was scraping the bottom of a very deep and fetid barrel).

It's also the only military FPS, alongside its predecessor, to actually make me feel for the characters I played, and the NPCs I was fighting alongside, and, when significant deaths happen in both games, it does actually feel personal. In Warfighter, and I won't give away spoilers, there's a mission when you really do feel rage towards the enemy after a significant event, and I got wrapped up in it enough to find myself shooting downed terrorists in anger. It's not as deep as Spec Ops: The Line (that was special in a very different way), but it has it's own emotional resonance. CoD completely fluffed every similar moment and I found myself not actually giving a shit about any NPC, or my own character for that matter. It was just a slow walk, tripping the next round of shooty, shooty, to see the next vacuous spectacle before more slow walking to the next spectacle. The plots were inane and timing horrible, just like Michael Bay. 

I won't disagree that it was rushed. It does show in places, especially multiplayer, but to give it a 3 and MW3 a 9? Edge have lost it completely. Hell, Homefront had a better campaign than MW3 and that was almost as horrid, saved by a truly interesting and well done MP.

I do find it a bit suspect the way that a lot of places that have given COD and the BF3 campaign a free pass have suddenly found their critical faculties for this. It's as if they've waited for the cool kid to say he doesn't like it, then all agreed.

Saying that, that's two years in a row that EA have played silly beggars with their FPS 'beta' and the way reviewers get a copy of the game. They might have pushed reviewers too far. I'm not sure about the patch either, I'd say they should review the campaign without it for the people who don't have their console on-line.

Mod74 wrote:

"We are managing the ups and downs. Our Q1 and Q2 were better than expected. Our Q3 appears soft, due mostly to Medal of Honor," said EA CEO John Riccitiello. He went on that the company reduced its guidance for the year because of the "weakness in Q3 associated with Medal of Honor."

Dumping something unfinished into the market to hit Christmas not great for business after all.

Like BF3 last year ?

I sincerely hope they don't just disband Danger Close in a huffy fit, the way Activision seem to. To even turn in what they did in under 18 months is still impressive, even if they needed the day 1 patch to finish it. They deserve a chance to show what they can achieve with better resources IMO, but so did Kaos with Homefront and look what happened to that.

I picked this up for £30 as I had a voucher and it's not so bad, the campaign is, like Ali said, a lot better than BF3 and Black OPS and the MP isn't terrible and it's quite nice to play a game of Death Match without Helicopters and mini guns and other assorted shite ruining it for me.

It will still be traded for Halo though as no one I know will ever play it.

Perhaps worth bearing in mind that your opinions of games are traditionally completely the opposite of the rest of the world though. 
Funnily enough, when I saw the reviews this was getting, my first thought was "I'll bet Ali loves this."



g.man