"EA is calling the game simply, Medal of Honor."

Is that the real title or a stock name for now? It'd be sad if Hollywood's cheap naming trend spreads onto games. If so, maybe they should call it "The Medal of Honor" ("Final Destination", "The Final Destination"..grrr)

I'm wondering if the have plans to make a Wii version. MoH Wii use the best scheme for Wii-mote FPS controls. Seeing that they plan to use Battlefield tech for the multiplayer though I would make that guess a no.

This is a smart move. There have been so many games based on WWII, but Modern Warfare proves that current wars can benefit the FPS market. With situations like Pakistan and Afghanistan clearly on our minds, our art forms are going to reflect our concerns and fears for quite some time.

M5dal of H5n5r 5: More Honory

@ John Smith: Unfortunately now.

@ Edward Vertigo: I think it would've been an even better idea had Infinity Ward not done it two years ago.

I had the distinct pleasure of working on this project while interning at EALA a little over a year ago. The team is simply amazing and I wish them all the best! Can't wait to see the final product!

That picture is bad ass! I'd get it just for that.

Smart move for EA. The medal of honor series was great, the modern day retelling will be good for the average person to know what war is really like. I still can hear the bullets whiz by my head at the d-day landing. very realiztic. Modern day war from 2000 thru 2009 has many stories to tell.

Ken,

I don't think one studio using one setting invalidates the potential of another studio doing something in the same setting. After all, Infinity Ward was founded by people who decided to make a game with the same basic setting they had used at their previous studio.

I also appreciate that this game seems to be definitively set in Afghanistan. That is not the case with Infinity Ward (outside of the extremely brief Afghanistan intro in MW2), which uses a much vaguer "Middle East" setting.

Now we'll have people complaining that modern settings are played out in 2 years.

@ Bob

That's because no one has the guts to do a good Vietnam game. Also the Korean War seems forgotten. Sure they could do a Cold War game, but that could get boring quick.

I remember the days when all we had for modern day shooters were Tom Clancy games and Counter Strike. It's nice to see other studios picking up the torch so to speak. I am interested in this game, and I hope it does well. Best of luck to everyone at EALA and DICE.

Aside from the fact they are obviously copying the much more successful Call of Duty franchise (with exception of the first Medal of Honor), this sounds like it could be interesting, especially with DICE doing the multiplayer.

Setting it in a real place like Afghanistan, where a real war is going on and about to ramp up again, is definitely an attempt to one-up Modern Warfare from the get go. It's not only modern, it's realistic, which seems to have been taboo so far (just look at Six Days in Fallujah). Activision didn't want Call of Duty broaching modern times in the first place, so it's good to see that EA knows it can't tepidly rehash or play follow the leader if it ever hopes to out compete CoD.
It's good to see competition working to break the ice on controversial ideas. Hopefully this raises the profile of games as a whole (though I bet anything there will be huge amounts of controversy manufactured in the media leading up to Medal of Honor's release).

This game could receive a lot of backlash when its released. Looking at my crystal ball, if the additional troops Obama called for actually happens (Senate has to approve more $ to fund it) then the war will take a turn for the worst and public support for it will further drop as has been over the years. The conflict comes in when we remember that Medal of Honor as a series has been patriotic in their treatment of the various war theaters. No one celebrates what happened in Vietnam, and Afghanistan is heading in that direction and people won't be happy with a game that celebrates the cluster fuck that is the Afghan war.

@Reid: I know what your saying, but who honestly cares what the media or extremist have to say about a game, a game that is trying for once to have a realistic story about actual living people. Every Medal of Honor game I've ever played has been very solid, and that is what I expect out of this title.

Medal of Honor: You People Will Buy Anything You See Enough Ads For

Nazis are the only enemy that video games can accurately portray as bad guys.

We can shoot them, blow them apart, and call them names--to our heart's content. The beauty? Nobody is offended, the subject matter is 65 years old, and you know you're the good guy.

Even World at War struggled when it attempted to portray the South Pacific. I didn't any of the proper racial slurs from the Americans. They were calling the Japanese all kinds of nasty things.

The stereotype Russian voice actor didn't have any trouble saying anything and everything about Nazis. But, the Japanese didn't get the same treatment in the game. We all know that's not how it was.

If we can't portray WWII properly, how are we supposed to get Afganistan right? And, why would we want to? Even when you get it right, you're wrong.

I liked blowing up demons in hell. At least I knew I was the good guy. And, there wasn't any worry about offending people. No matter what, this game will offend people. I'm not talking about Mortal Kombat's cartoon violence; this game is taking on modern events that people are very passionate about.

I wouldn't touch subject matter like this with a ten foot pole.

Best of luck to the Medal of Honor team. You'll need it.

Kevin Kissell said: "Smart move for EA. The medal of honor series was great, the modern day retelling will be good for the average person to know what war is really like. I still can hear the bullets whiz by my head at the d-day landing. very realiztic. Modern day war from 2000 thru 2009 has many stories to tell."

From my perspective there won't be any game that truly tells us what "war is really like" nowadays because of the human tragedy that modern warfare brings. It's not too hard to find on the internet stories from US soldiers about the killing of innocent people and the devastation they see in the faces of the survivors, which is something I don't expect to see in any videogame, ever, despite it being commonplace and a fact of modern warfare.

Another factor in Afghanistan are very nasty cases of friendly fire. Will we ever see something like this in a videogame? I doubt it.

Finally another factor is having the soldiers play the role of police, providing security for areas. This includes things like checkpoints, where you do have cases of friendly fire and innocent deaths. I have a feeling that the game won't feature this "mundane" role and will likely have the player play a more offense oriented role in the game.

My point is that I don't see any game featuring a realistic depiction of modern warfare, at least in terms of storyline and setting.

I mean, we can all expect someone to make an "ultra-realism" MOD for the game where your aim is hard to adjust, a couple bullets will take you out, and you can't bunny-hop around the map. :)

This is just another geographical setting, and I don't think it will be controversial if the enemy is Al Qaeda and/or the Taliban.

From my point of view the real controversy lies in the whole "bigger picture" of how ineffective the conflict has been in stabilizing the country and providing security, something that the game will likely not talk about and frankly doesn't need to.

Another issue may lie in it being an unpopular topic as Reid Kimball alluded to. Especially if the troop boost means more action on the ground and less bombing. Under Musharraf's lead, Pakistan has opted to fight on the ground rather than use aerial strikes and that resulted in thousands of dead soldiers over 6-7 years IIRC, which made it a very unpopular war to the Pakistani public. If this new push means more "face to face" fighting and significantly more losses it might become a very distasteful topic to cover.

Any attempt to show the "shades of grey" here will be paper thin. It has to be.

I have never played any video game (ever) that presented enemies as any thing BUT fodder. Is there a new design revolution that I missed?

I pitied Ryan when Bioshock forced his death in cutscene style. But, I never cared about ripping ADAM out of little girls or killing the citizens of Rapture. They were just... fodder. A means to an end.

The beauty of Bioshock is how it allowed the designers to speak their minds in a free environment. Rapture is imaginary and moves freely in our consciousness.

Afganistan is a place where our neighbors die. Big difference.

In the end, kids will gun through the game fairly mindlessly--grinning at each head shot and shrugging their shoulders every time they lose a life (and restart at the last checkpoint). That's what it will be. And, I don't see any designers breaking that formula for fun with any sense of reality.

Modern Warfare 2's terror mission is really no different. I still don't feel any connection. It's a game and the only way through is to shoot. There's no freedom of choice. I don't get to choose; and the idea of being forced falls flat. Because, nothing is done to really connect me with the people I'm shooting. For instance, I heard Ryan pour out his soul before I finally met him; I didn't get to meet anybody in MW2.

There are some other ways to make characters more human. And, that's to actually make them look and sound more human... Maybe with the technology to really bring the human face and body to life, we can depict people are more than just robotic fodder. That's when you can really get the fear into the bodies of innocent victims. Then, you have to take the time to pause the action and allow them to beg for their lives before you gun them down. With the right technology, it can be done. But, I haven't seen it... And, would that be fun? Do you really want to feel like a murderer?

Maybe people will throw money at this. But, it will be because the designers aren't really conveying any of the horror of war or the "shades of grey". If that were truly there, most of us wouldn't think it was fun.

It's going to be paper thin. It has to be.

And, the fact that real situations where people are dying right now is being depicted in such a shallow paper thin fashion is going to bring a backlash. I seriously doubt the content will be handled appropriately.

It's the disconnect between the game world and real world that allows me to forgive the way enemy targets are portrayed. Either make it real or just make believe. The uncomfortable spaces in between are where you really get into trouble. Then again, real Afganistan doesn't sound fun, anyhow.

Great, another game that blindsides my work in progress. First it was BF2, then CoD4, now Medal of Honor.

From the looks of it, you will be playing the Special Forces that mainly saw activity in the early days of the war in Oct 2001, when they were dropped in to support the Northern Alliance fight against the Taliban. I hope we get to ride horses.

My concept artist used the same reference photos for the protagonist that we were going to submit as the next Ghost Recon installment for the Game Career Guide contest to revitalize a series. Didn't end up submitting at the 11th hour to keep the concept to ourselves. I learned the hard way after publishing concepts for my own project years predating BF2's announcement, only to find them execute the same concepts better than my mod could on a budget of free time.

As I know from designing and marketing tactical ('realistic') war games, half a lifetime of studying counter-insurgency warfare, plus five years infantry experience training for the war in Afghanistan, any form of 'realistic' narrative will not be found in the singleplayer component. Especially conceived by those with no military experience. I lost two buddies in Afghanistan, who I trained to go to war with and drank with.

The most important aspect in creating a 'realistic' combat experience is multiplayer. You need the human ingenuity and stupidity for your squad mates and opponents. AI, no matter how real they look or sound, detracts from that sense of realism.

While DICE is creating that aspect for MoH, hopefully they will draw lessons from the Project Reality mod for BF2 that has, in my opinion, captured the dynamics of combat better than any other game to date. The fallacy with that is it depends upon the players to act accordingly (communicate to collaborate) to shape the combat in a 'realistic' manner. When it works, it is incredible... if you're into that kind of thing.

What about "Six Days in Fallujah," is that game along the same lines as this? Will this game get the same backlash as Six Days? Or will the media simply be concerned about how much money this game will make compared to MW2?