By Nathan Grayson on February 12th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.
EA’s officially dishonorably discharged the Medal of Honor franchise. That’s unfortunate for a number of reasons, but mainly because it made John sad. As he put it, “It needs new direction, not shelving until the next inevitable reboot in five years time, once Battlefield has run entirely aground.” So, now it’s time for another episode of Good News, Bad News, Picture of an Ostrich. First, the good: Medal of Honor’s definitely not dead. Heck, it might not even be out of action for all that long. But now, the bad: based on comments to RPS by EA chief creative director Rich Hilleman, John might have hit the nail on the head. For now, Battlefield‘s the focus, meaning that it inherits the full weight of EA’s Call-of-Duty-dethroning expectations. Here is a picture of an ostrich. More details (about Medal of Honor, not ostriches) after the break.
Refreshingly, Hilleman admitted that EA was fully at fault for Medal of Honor and Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s rather dismal performances.
“We don’t think its a genre problem,” he said during a brief interview at last week’s DICE conference. “It’s an execution problem. We don’t think Medal of Honor’s performance speaks to any particular bias in that space against modern settings or World War II or any of that. It’s much more that we had some things we should’ve done better.”
“What we think right now is that, for the next couple years, we can just have one great thing in that space. So we’re choosing for it to be Battlefield.”
It remains to be seen, of course, whether or not that’s the best outcome for the large-scale shooter series, but Hilleman believes a brief break is far preferable to more Medal of Honor games developed under less-than-ideal conditions.
“I think a key part of this is having the right amount of high-quality production talent,” he explained. “And we didn’t have the quality of leadership we needed to make [Medal of Honor] great. We just have to get the leadership aligned. We’re blessed to have more titles than we can do well today. That’s a good problem, frankly. In the long term, we have to make sure we don’t kill those products by trying to do them when we can’t do them well.”
So for now, EA plans to watch and wait. Medal of Honor’s return, somewhat unsurprisingly, is a matter of when, not if. And while Hilleman implied it’d probably happen sooner rather than later, he provided an example that, um, didn’t quite instill confidence.
“There’s always someone at EA who’s sticking up for any number of the properties we have,” he concluded. “You know, I had somebody the other day say, ‘Come on, Mutant League Football. We gotta bring back Mutant League Football.’ So, to my mind, there’s always somebody at EA who loves a property. That property will come back when it’s time is right and there’s someone to carry it.”
Mutant League Football was last seen in 1993. So, er, right then.
12/02/2013 at 17:01 almostDead says:
FIRST.
Fucking yes! And I’ve not even read the article.
12/02/2013 at 17:07 Bedeage says:
I hope something unpleasant happens to you soon.
12/02/2013 at 17:28 Fede says:
If you trust his username, it has already happened!
12/02/2013 at 17:46 RabidTurtl says:
You know, I’m sorta glad too that it is sleeping, not dead.
Not because the recent games were great; the reboot was ok while I stayed away from Warfighter with a 10 foot pole.
I’m glad it isn’t outright dead because I still have fond memories of the earlier titles. MoH:AA was a great game, and I put many hours into it. It was one of the first FPS titles I played online, and I always had hope the series could reclaim its lost glory – probably an impossible dream considering 2015, Inc jumped ship to Activision and became IW. I would hate to see the series end on such a shitty title as Warfighter. It just brings back memories of how CnC was killed by EA after they released that turd CnC 4 (I’m not counting Generals 2 – as a f2p from EA with no campaign, I am already of the assumption it is going to be terrible).
12/02/2013 at 18:27 cairbre says:
LOL
12/02/2013 at 19:24 Davie says:
At the very least you could go back and edit your comment with something insightful and on-topic now that you’ve so hastily reserved your arbitrary spot. Otherwise it’s difficult to justify your existence.
12/02/2013 at 17:02 povu says:
Time to wake up Faith then.
12/02/2013 at 18:11 f1x says:
No way, there is a military shooter rotation to be mantained
13/02/2013 at 02:36 mouton says:
You can always give Faith more guns and remove those jumping parts because the focus groups found them confusing and not fun.
12/02/2013 at 17:03 aldo_14 says:
To be fair, when they had MoH ‘in that space’ they still only had one great thing.
12/02/2013 at 17:09 Joshua says:
Isn’t that what he said? The one great thing in that space prevents the growth of other things.
12/02/2013 at 17:32 aldo_14 says:
I thought ‘execution problems’ reflected that they recognised the game was pish, but they can’t actually admit it publicly.
13/02/2013 at 01:56 Dances to Podcasts says:
Strange, they don’t seem to have that much trouble executing it.
12/02/2013 at 17:34 Shooop says:
Even that’s not so great though. Not like it should have been.
12/02/2013 at 17:11 Revolving Ocelot says:
You could say that EA are sticking their heads in the sand.
12/02/2013 at 18:26 Morlock says:
Absolutely. It was clear from the start that the MoH relaunch wouldn’t be able to lift off.
12/02/2013 at 20:40 spindaden says:
i think that pun was a bit of o strich. either that or i just didn’t get it.
13/02/2013 at 12:26 SuicideKing says:
Your prospects look beak…
12/02/2013 at 17:13 Hoaxfish says:
EA is expertly trained in working with dead bodies.
It regularly deals with gutting, cutting good series, dangling their bodies as sign of life, etc.
12/02/2013 at 17:21 Leper says:
Shame they haven’t got the resurrection part sorted yet. Running electricity through the muscles is never more than an imitation.
(This might be an analogy)
13/02/2013 at 13:28 Dozer says:
I worked here one summer, picking up dead bodies.
“Where did they go?”
Eh heh heh heh. There’s always a buyer.
12/02/2013 at 17:16 SanguineAngel says:
Beauuuuuutiful plumage
12/02/2013 at 20:08 Lacessit says:
The plumage don’t enter into it!
13/02/2013 at 01:41 Skabooga says:
I came to see the ostrich. I was not disappointed.
12/02/2013 at 17:19 WoundedBum says:
I would be OK with military manshoots, it’s not the premise I don’t like. I actually thought MoH 2010 was OK. Not bad, but well acted and the story wasn’t save the world…again! Just some guys in Afghanistan. It wasn’t realistic of course, but it was OK.
Haven’t played Warfighter, but it has no real appeal for me.
12/02/2013 at 17:26 Shivoa says:
So they’re diverting resources from trying to push a MoH game out to make the next Battlefield’s single-player even more bombastic (/ CoD styled) and just as terrible as the last outing? Or do they mean the next Battlefield will further drift from focussing on BF style (large, open) multiplayer focus and be more about trying to put out a CoD competitor? Neither of those plans sound like it’ll make BF4 a better game.
12/02/2013 at 17:29 Jason Moyer says:
I don’t really understand why they’ve seemingly stopped the Bad Company series, as the multiplayer was Battlefield-light (in a good way) and the singleplayer was basically the CoD formula with some self-awareness and humor added to it. I’d much rather play a Bad Company 3 campaign and some quality rush maps and have Battlefield 4 focus entirely on large scale multiplayer battles.
12/02/2013 at 17:40 Jerion says:
Yeah, I always thought Bad Company 2 (I didn’t play the first) had a lovely sort of self-awareness. It wasn’t trying to be overly bombastic or gigantically scaled, and it did what it did well. There’s definitely quite a bit of room for well-done games like that.
I would really quite enjoy a “Bad Company 2142″, come to think of it.
12/02/2013 at 17:41 Shooop says:
They appear to acknowledge the mistake, but have they actually learned anything from it?
Or are they just planning on pulling it back out once the Battlefield series is indistinguishable from CoD aside from the name?
12/02/2013 at 17:45 Alexander says:
1. turn it into f2p
2. call it MEDALFACE or HONORFACE
3 profit – but not before destroying the dev studio, because that’s what EA does.
12/02/2013 at 17:45 Baka says:
Is he angry or just really tired? I can’t tell.
12/02/2013 at 18:06 strangeloup says:
I liked Mutant League Football. EA in the days of the Mega Drive were a lot less evil.
Also blargh multiplayer-focused manshoots.
12/02/2013 at 18:29 cairbre says:
And what was wrong with 1993 exactly!
12/02/2013 at 18:34 mehteh says:
As long as its remains console focus I will continue to consider it dead anyways
12/02/2013 at 18:54 SuperNashwanPower says:
Sleeping? I have a pillow.
We can put it over its face. It will die quietly and peacefully, and leave its beautifully Frostbite rendered corpse serenely in bed.
12/02/2013 at 18:57 SuperNashwanPower says:
this comment has been edited on the grounds of utter, utter apathy
12/02/2013 at 19:45 Jahkaivah says:
EA, you have a traditionally multiplayer military shooter series, and a traditionally singleplayer military shooter series.
Why not gear them in those two separate directions so that they can compliment each other?
Or hell, make one of them WWII again, that’ll really shake things up.
12/02/2013 at 22:38 Arglebargle says:
EA. Even when they get something right, they do it for the wrong reasons. Or vice versa.
My money goes elsewhere these days.
13/02/2013 at 00:39 Otter says:
I’ve gotten far more entertainment from these comments than I ever would from the game. Thanks, snarkmongers!
13/02/2013 at 03:52 The Random One says:
So can I expect Mutant League Football to be rebooted as an FPS next year?
And MoH to be rebooted as whatever genre is popular at the time (puzzle platformers I bet) on 2033?
13/02/2013 at 09:58 lijenstina says:
A world where EA still exists in 2033 is an post apocalyptic one.