Medal of Honour Beta – Some Thoughts
by Ben Tyrer (Tumblr)
Medal of Honour, PC – £23.99 delivered
When I first caught wind of the new Medal of Honour (yes, Honour) game, I was sceptical to say the least. Having being disillusioned to the frostbite engine during the course of Battlefield Bad Company 2, and seeing the inevitable resemblance to Modern Warfare from a mile off, I wasn’t sure what exactly this new title could bring to the table. Having played the beta, I can certainly say I’m feeling far more optimistic about it.
First, I want to briefly mention my issues with Bad Company 2. The PC version’s hit detection online left a lot to be desired for. I can’t think of anything more infuriating than the glancing injustice of a perfect shot going to waste, or indeed a clear escape still resulting in your swift demise even after having turned a corner into cover. I also wasn’t a fan of the destructible elements of the engine, preferring a static map I can learn off by heart, and the clear encouragement of players to shove grenade launchers onto every weapon turned me into a seething angry internet man.
Thankfully, even while the servers were labouring under the weight of goodness-knows-how-many Monday night gamers, I found little to complain about with regards to hit detection. Gunplay feels more tightly tuned and the weapons, though limited in the beta, were satisfying to shoot and came with a decent amount of unlockable options such as open-tipped ammunition (which does considerably more damage but reduces the accuracy of shots), all manner of sights and scopes, and the chance to carry an extra clip for prosperity.
The two maps included in the beta (Shahikot Mountains, a snowy locale, and Kunar Base located on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border) are well designed, with a good number of choke points and bottlenecks and plenty of paths leading to opportunities to flank the enemy team from behind. The two game modes featured in the beta are Combat Mission, an objective-based match where Coalition forces must progress across the map while the OPFOR attempts to hinder them, and Sector Control which is essentially king of the hill with multiple ‘hills’. Both are good fun, albeit nothing we haven’t seen or played before.
Despite the bones I picked with it, the Frostbite engine is a reasonably pretty affair and MoH looks just as good as Bad Company 2, despite inheriting the ridiculously over-done bloom effects which can thankfully be turned off. It’s probably due to their relatively smaller-than-BC2 size, but I found the two maps the beta featured easier to run on around the same graphics options (High).
Before wrapping up, I just want to briefly discuss the matter of the current controversy surrounding the changing of the name ‘Taliban’ to ‘Opposing forces’. I’m not entirely sure I supported the idea of making the combat scenario as ‘real’ as American Army vs the Taliban, mainly because I don’t think the idea of these extremists getting the idea that we enjoy murdering them in online death simulations would do any favours for world peace, but also because trivialising on-going conflicts by turning them into flashy games with achievements and ragequitting doesn’t sit quite right with me. On the other hand, the name change is just that – a name change. Nothing else has been changed, the player models and setting remain the same, with the implication still very much being that you are fighting the Taliban and yet the masses who were so outraged by the choice to actually name them as such are now completely at ease. I think that speaks a lot for just how ‘concerned’ the majority of these naysayers actually were, though I applaud EA in its decision to take action in order to avoid further unnecessary bad press. Alas, I’m here to evaluate games and not the politics that fuel them, I’m not worldly enough for any of this business!
Overall, I’m now plenty excited and optimistic that Medal of Honour has the potential to be a thoroughly smashing online experience. It remains to be seen whether the single player portion will be any cop, though interestingly it is being developed separately and on the Unreal 3 engine. It’s certainly now on my to-play radar, which goes to show that letting people try your game before release not only helps with early bug fixing and improvement, but can win the hearts of even the frostiest cynics. Good show, EA.
Ben Tyrer
Currently attending Bede Sixth Form College, in his spare time Ben enjoys talking about himself in the third person, photoshopping, doodling, and writing words about games at SavyGamer.co.uk Twitter
How can any FPS gamer endorse the following:
In Medal of Honour, the direction in which you run is decided by where your mouse is pointing. Therefore, you can only run in the direction you’re looking.
It’s an abomination – who the fuck lets that slip!
I’d love to hear a response to this amateur approach to basic movement.
I don’t recall this being the case at all from the hours and hours I played.
You know, it is possible to strafe. Also, if you hold [up] and [left] you generally move forward and to the right. That might sound limited, but when you’ve been playing like that for nearly 15 years, it becomes natural. OK, so you’ve only actually got eight degrees of movement, but in practical terms you can actually move anywhere I want, and hit a moving target at the same time.
The problem I’ve always had with thumb sticks is that you have to keep them pushed in a direction to move your view, and let it snap back to stop. Hence the typical pan-tilt-pan looking you see on gameplay movies from consoles. On the PC your head is moving while your hand is moving. When it stops, you stop moving and point exactly were you moved the mouse. Consoles are better for analogue movement, PCs (well mice) is better for looking.
Or, are you actually a PC gamer whose completely missed an obvious control feature? One that’s been around since Quake.
I actually think it was a joke.
Hook, line, and sinker 🙂
I agree with every view you’ve put forward in this article. If I were a games blogger you’d have saved me a job (and you’ve probably worded it much better than I could too)
My thoughts exactly. Wasn’t excited at all about MoH, but I still tried the beta. I was quite impressed, especially when compared to the BF:BC2 beta.
I might actually buy this game, too.
BTW: “applaud EA in it’s decision” should be its, since it’s possessive. “It’s” is used to shorten “it is”.
Corrected, cheers.
A good review, I enjoyed reading that, thank-you for writing it. One small thing that I thought was cheap:
“Medal of Honour (yes, Honour)”
No, Honor. The ‘Medal Of Honor’ is the name of it. That is its name. Germans, Scanadavians and French people don’t sit there snorting at how the British have changed the spelling and/or pronunciation of the words we’ve taken from them. Only the British are so arrogant as to think that their language is the definitive version.
And given the low literacy rate in America, just be glad that “of” is spelled correctly.
Yeah, I second Simon Cowell’s point. It’s not just the name of a game, it’s the name of an actual medal awarded to actual soldiers for actual bravery. It’s pretty disrespectful to deliberately miss-spell it.
“Yeah, I second Simon Cowell’s point”
I never thought I see those words appear on SavyGamer.
I don’t think Ben is saying that they should change the spelling, just that he isn’t going to change how he spells it when he writes it.
While it certainly wasn’t my intention to disrespect any reciever of the commendation, I find it hard to believe someone would actually be offended were I to spell it how its spelled where I live. Or am I crazy?
I think I am a bit more cynical than you are about the Taliban name change.
When Liam Fox first called for retailers to decline to stock the game, EA’s response was this:
“We give gamers the opportunity to play both sides. Most of us have been doing this since we were seven: someone plays the cop, someone must be robber. In Medal of Honor multiplayer, someone’s got to be the Taliban”
Is this somehow not true any more?
The fact that they let a bit of ignorant reactionary press change their game is a bit worrying for me. I don’t like the idea that people who know very little about games should mouth off about them, and then be listened to.
I’d have said that if people were offended by the idea of playing on the side of the Taliban in multiplayer, they should just not play the game.
Also, and since you’ve only played the mutliplayer you might not have realised this Ben, but you still kill people who are named as “the Taliban” in the single player component. It’s only the multiplayer that has changed.
Now thats interesting, and something I wasn’t aware of. Of course it all goes to futher the fact that these people obviously dont understand games and have just taken the whole affair on face value. How can they be satisfied with such a small change, then? The probable answer is that they weren’t as morally outraged as they enjoyed making out they were. It all boils down to the constant penalising of games and the people who play them by the media. Also conspiracy, fetch my tin hat etc.
Their argument is that they weren’t bothered by the fact that the Taliban are featured in the game, just that you could play as them and kill american troops.
It strikes me as odd that the same argument isn’t made for all the other games in which some manner of terrorist faction is trying to kill american soldiers, whether the specific opposing force is directly mentioned or not. How exactly are they quantifiyng the levels of acceptability? It’s not okay for the taliban to shoot at troops, but it’s alright if ‘evil team ne’er-do-well’ want to take a shot? It’s these arguments which make me think it’s better just to stick with fictional characters in fictional settings when it’s a topic as controversial as war, because otherwise the masses become riled and it all serves to distract from what’s really in question, and that’s the quality of the game. (As an unrelated sidenote, my GPU died over the weekend and its replacement is in the post. I should be back up and online by tomorrow, but meanwhile thank god for the PS3s compatability with USB keyboards!)
The other more cynical possibility, is that they were aware that people would be annoyed and loud, and that they’d have to acquiesce and change the name, but were banking on it for ‘no Russian’-esque publicity generating furor.
I thought the parallels between this and what happened to the rest system during WoW’s beta were quite interesting.
For those of you who don’t remember, back during beta the way resting worked in World of Warcraft was that after an hour or so of playing, you’d get a debuff that made you earn 50% less XP. Angry Internet Mans complained (it’s what they do), and so Blizzard said “okay fine! Instead of giving you a debuff, if you don’t play for a couple of hours we’ll give you a temporary buff that makes you earn 200% XP!”
The math worked out exactly the same, they just made the ground state equivalent to the debuff and made the buffed state equivalent to the old not-debuffed state.
That sort of complex multivariable algebra was too tricky to figure out, and so the Angry Internet Mans were pacified despite absolutely nothing having been changed behind the curtain.
In this case EA is not even pretending that they made a real change (the Blizzard thing at least involved making a couple of icons), they’re literally just changing a bit of text. It’s kind of funny, really, how little it takes to pacify people.
“Combat Mission, an objective-based match where Coalition forces must progress across the map”
You’ve peaked my interest sir. That’s about the only kind of multiplayer I really enjoy.
My brain!
Prodded at the beta on the last night it was running, and I was stunned by the quality.
The lack thereof! O.o Invisible walls every five paces, level design so full of glitches I couldn’t kneel to take a shot without slowly ice-skating backwards down a hill, or getting stuck in an invisible two inch wide crevasse, apparently holding tightly onto my bootlaces.
The guns don’t have any recoil. Any. Recoil. Pure CoF – didn’t we get past that?
The gameworld is ugly, humongous low-poly rocks jagging out of every surface, and the level design forces face to face mashing with invisible barriers preventing any flanking or creative use of terrain around the edges – while friction settings prevent the scaling of internal slopes. Even in outdoor settings on rough terrain, the level design is expressly an endeavor in corridor-shooting, while the gameplay encourages sniping from within the distance fog over any effort to reach the objectives.
Bad Company 2 may be a very ‘gamey’ game, but the mechanics were balanced in such a way as to encourage good gameplay and objective focus. MoH feels like a cheap clone of CoD and Battlefield combined, openly stolen features in every aspect of the design and not the slightest whiff of any new ideas.. I cannot hope it succeeds. It’s just a business decision, not a work of creativity, or a game of any fun. If you own Call of Duty Modern Warfare, or Bad Company 2, while neither are great games – you’re better off playing them for the roles in which they excel than this ugly ripoff.
Agree with this completely. Even ‘America’s Army’ was in some measure more polished than this. Also the real ‘tier one’ operators are (now) just as brutal as the Taliban. Who brings frag grenades to a real-life hostage situation? :/
My beta key reviewed the game for me http://twitpic.com/2d5bjk
Just a quick note: you can’t flank an enemy from behind. You can attack from behind, or you can flank your opponent – the latter meaning that you’re attacking them from the side.