“Opposing Forces” – Medal of Honor (2010)

In 2010, it was just eight years since Medal of Honor was one of the biggest things in gaming. Yet the series had already spent more than half the time since flailing in identity crisis, lurching from reimagining to reimagining even before Call of Duty took its place at the top. Now, as one big throw of the dice, EA combined the efforts of its original team and the Battlefield: Bad Company developers and stripped out subtitles for a reboot, updated to be about more modern warfare. It was quite commercially successful itself but did not reverse the series’s fortunes, and introduced some new issues.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was already a game going hard into Call of Duty territory, but Medal of Honor takes it further still. Its atmosphere, intensity and appearance all follow suit, although its set pieces of long-range sniping and firing from static machine guns were already a step behind Activision’s invention in service of thrill-seeking. It takes away any of the strategic elements of European Assault but makes the squad a big part of both the action and the story in a similar way to its clear predecessors.

In doing so it doesn’t give the same freedom of movement or destruction as Bad Company 2, but somehow has worse problems with the obvious artificiality of untraversable waist-high barriers and enemies who wait for you to catch up with the action before firing at your squad members. Still, its shooting works alright and provides some chances to take different approaches, and it has some occasional bright ideas like its slow motion standoffs. Being an unexceptional take on the Call of Duty games of a couple of years previous wouldn’t put it in the worst company. The problem comes with trying to be a Medal of Honor game too.

Up until the reboot, the constant elements in the series had been a World War II setting and a sentimental veneration of the military, both hangovers from the pseudo-educational and historical concept that launched it. Medal of Honor updates the setting to 2002, so that’s one gone. The game does maintain a seriousness which sets it a long way apart from Bad Company, but goes less heavy on the sentimentality compared to the series past.

At least, less heavy until the end of the game, when it positively slathers it on, bringing on “heroes on board”, death, strings and a written dedication. On the “Tier 1” mode it extends to six successive paragraphs. “Most Americans do not know what our Special Operations Forces community experience”, it admonishes from its specific perspective. “They do not know what these Warriors endure”.

It goes on a lot more. “With their sacrifice, legends are born and will live as examples to inspire the heroes that will lead our nation to victory in the years ahead”. There is a clear ratcheting up of rhetoric to go with the fact it’s about the then-ongoing war in Afghanistan. Where Call of Duty was careful to detach its modern warfare from reality, Medal of Honor is much more direct in bringing that rhetoric to something with an air of historical authority. It would be a queasy prospect for any ongoing conflict, never mind this one.

Perhaps it’s that wish for historical verisimilitude which led EA to decide that in multiplayer some players should play as the Taliban. Maybe they were courting controversy, seeing how well it had worked out with Modern Warfare 2. Even when that game had players massacre innocent people, though, it was careful to make them fictional Russians. It was consistent with that series’s messages and could be sidestepped around with an added option to skip.

For EA to be treating the other side as anything but a singular evil was more of a problem, and they were left with no such easy option. They ended up changing the name of the side to a euphemistic “Opposing Forces” and still ended up with the game banned from military bases and the UK’s Defence Secretary calling for a ban and saying that “It’s hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game.” It is a thoroughly un-British game, given how American it is, but that’s not usually raised as a problem. It’s difficult to say that the controversy damaged sales too much, but managing to be hoist with their own petard of jingoism was still indicative of the state of the series.

---

Top of the charts for week ending 16 October 2010: