Medal Of Honor: Warfighter – Making The Same Mistakes?

Features

X360 Magazine Team

Medal Of Honor: Warfighter is building on its Danger Close’s ‘realistic’ original, but can EA’s rebooted series compete with Call Of Duty and Battlefield?

Once Again, Where’s Our ‘U’?

Quite why the internet’s first thought on this gritty military update was ‘is Bin Laden’s assassination in it?’, we don’t know.

Perhaps Danger Close’s inclusion of the Taliban as part of the original title’s multiplayer had something to do with it – thematically appropriate as that inclusion was at the time.

The answer to the online community’s initial question, however, remains ‘no, of course it isn’t, what type of furore do you think that would cause?’

The answer to this, in turn, being ‘a very large one, because the terrorist leader’s death is quite a sensitive issue’.

Instead, EA’s sequel will focus upon the less newsworthy but still hugely eventful everyday goings-on for tier one Navy SEAL operators, doubtlessly at one stage returning to Afghanistan but for the moment offering Isabela City, the Philippines, as its only confirmed setting.

Due for release in October, it’s being pieced together by Danger Close, the same selection of EA LA employees that was tasked with developing the single player elements of 2010’s Medal Of Honor.

Incidentally, the only other title on which this specific group of individuals have worked. Casting one eye to the folks at Irrational, Danger Close has included a One Hit Kill hardcore mode alongside other, less testing ones.

Co-operative play will also feature, though almost certainly not via a full-blown co-operative campaign. Interestingly, multiplayer action won’t be farmed out to DICE this time around either, online modes being pieced together by the Los Angeles team as we type.

Warfighter should hopefully avoid modern shooters’ ‘Follow The Man’ complex, too. Rather than tunnelling the experience as per every modern shooter on the market, Danger Close will instead offer a degree of choice to its players, one prominent example being whether to set C4 charges in order to breach a building, or otherwise sneak inside, hoping to catch its occupants unawares.

Or perhaps you might just enjoy sneaking up behind them and shouting “boo” – how are we to know? The point is, the option will be there to do so.

DICE’s Frostbyte 2.0 engine will afford Warfighter the chance to take some reasonably impressive twirls, counting swaying chandeliers, splintering wood and reams of office paper among the items you’ll be dislodging with bullet fire during the course of play. This marks a significant change from 2010’s outing of course, which put Unreal Engine 3 to uses other than making grey slimy walls greyer and slimier.

Contextual fidelity will be provided to sit alongside the visual kind by a narrative penned by real-life tier one operatives in their down time. If it were us, we’d prefer to spend our holiday asleep and dreaming about kittens. Perhaps that’s why we’re not an elite military presence, feared around the world.

Anyway, this should ensure that orders given in-game will again mirror those of important counter-terrorist operations. Other than the ones to cover everything up afterwards because you’ve actually performed a controlled explosion on a bin, of course.

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