You're Doing It Wrong - Medal of Honor

I'd like to introduce a new section. This is an idea I've had for a while but haven't had the time to put it all together. This first one is actually written by a friend of mine, who has asked to remain anonymous as he did it as a favour for me last minute. Oops, did I say he? I meant she. Or they. Them. It. Ahhh, anyway, check out "You're Doing It Wrong", written today by Alan Smithee.

Alright, Medal of Honor: Warfighter. With a name that fucking awesome, what could possibly go wrong? This is some authentic shit, apparently. See, in real life, soldiers are controlled by mysterious puppet masters that line up all their shots for them, because God doesn't want America to miss. Also, in real life you can take a .50 calibre sniper round to the chest and just shrug it off. Multiple times. Alright, I know what you're thinking. Real life isn't fun. I agree with you. Real life sucks, that's why we play games. This is not military sim, this is an action fps. I'm not here to talk about how EA's marketing department fucked up with this game, I don't have the time or patience for that. Instead, I'm going to outline the ways in which Warfighter fails as a sequel. This is MoH vs MoH:WF.

Let's talk openings. The first Medal of Honor began with a bunch of chatter outlining the events leading up to 9/11, as well as the military intelligence's response, before dropping the player straight into the heart of Iraq. Straight up, we meet the first of our three groups of main characters - SEAL Team Neptune. We play as Rabbit, a man with a bizarre taste in auto-tuned Arabian pop. Within the first five seconds, every character is presented with at least the broad strokes of personality. Joining Rabbit are Voodoo, Mother and Preacher (the least interesting of the bunch). In Gunshooter, we open up with a cutscene of somewhere, and two mysterious dudes emerging from the water. The sneak up behind a guy and we're instantly thrust into a first person view of the back of a guys head. 'Press Mouse 1 to shoot" we are told. No need to even do anything else. In fact, we can sit here all day if we want to. So go ahead, click. Bam, dead guy. Satisfied? Well, don't sit still for too long, the game has some more parts for you to watch. And that's basically the intro mission in a  nutshell. You literally have to do three things. Click the mouse to kill a guy you can't miss. Press F on a truck to plat a bomb. And shoot at a chopper that you can't miss as long as you stand in the right spot. And run a bit. Compare that with MoH, where right from the start you're thrown into a hostile village and have to fight your way to free a hostage. There's no handholding; you want to save the guy, you're going to have to kill everyone in your way. Sure, your team will help some, but the onus is on you to play the game. BTW, the guy you play as in Bulletuser is Preacher AKA MR. Two Lines of Uninteresting Dialogue from the first game. Great choice, guys.

Another big problem that Cutscenewatcher has over it's predecessor is a massive focus on set pieces. There are maybe two, maybe three 'setpieces' in the first game. If that. Bombexploder has a new setpiece every five seconds. You thought Call of Duty was bad? There are more set pieces in the first two missions of Doorfighter than there are in the entirety of MW1. Wrap your head around that. The setpieces in the first game were used to either create dramatic tension (such as the feeling of helplessness as hundreds of Taliban rush your crumbling defensive position) or to relieve tension (the following helicopter mission). Here, it's the equivalent of some guy flashing you in the back street. I don't care how big his cock is, I saw it the first time. now it's just getting ridiculous.

Let's talk villains. In The first game, there really wasn't an overall villain. It starts out as you trying to wipe out the Taliban as revenge, but quickly devolves into a desperate struggle to rescue your friends and get the hell out of dodge. The enemy was as much the location as anything else. Or maybe that stupid army general that seemed more interested in guts and glory over brains. Arabkiller tries to have a more present villain, even setting the tutorial mission as a terrorist training under him, but it ultimately fails as you never really feel the villains presence. His lackey gets some strong screen time and the only genuinely effective moment in the game, but even then he's given no back story outside of "evil guy", so who cares. There's some attempt at a story about explosives or something, but it's lost in the endlessly shifting locations and objectives. In the first one, you never left the one mountain and you had a strong sense of place and purpose because of it. This one has you bouncing from Singapore to the Philippines to the Middle East and everywhere in between desperately trying to tie it all together cohesively. It's big conceit is that most of these missions are supposable based on real events but they lose their power when they are twisted together to fit a fictional story. Either go 100% real, or 100% fiction. Actually, I think the main enemy is doors. There are so many doors to brutalize in this game. In fact, Breachshooter devotes an entire mini-game mechanic to it. I'll let the boss talk about that more in his review, though. There's still more shit to trudge through.

Ok, let's talk graphics. Lensflareblinder was meant to be the big flagship for the Frostbite 2 engine. Did it work? Oh God, no. It's like the developers didn't even understand the fundamentals of the engine. There's almost no destruction and what little there is makes no sense. You can blast a guy through a metal sheet, but not through a cardboard box? You can't shoot through holes in cover but a block of concrete won't protect you from a grenade? It's nonsensical. not to mention it runs badly, the textures are shockingly low-resolution at times and the animations just look bad. Again, this is more a review thing but I thought it was worth mentioning as clearing using a proprietary engine was a big mistake for I'mruningoutofclevernames. The first one ran on Unreal Engine and while it came with the usual Unreal problems, it at least functioned as you would expect.

Alright, let's wrap this shit up. There's more I want to talk about, and even some things that Warfighter gets right, but the review is a better place for all that. I really love the MoH reboot, that's why Kyle got me to write this. We've often argued over who likes it more. I just can't believe that this sequel was made by the same team. Everything the did right in the first game is gone. everything they did wrong in the first game is worse. Outside of a few story beats and one original mechanic, the game is a total, abyssal failure. It was buggy to the point of broken at launch and doesn't run much better since the colossal patch. It's insulting to the lives of the soldiers it's meant to be respecting and it doesn't know what it wants to be. Where is the market for this game? It's too flashy for authentic crowd, it's too me-too-try-hard for the Call of Duty crowd, it's multiplayer isn't good enough to win over the Battlefield crowd and with black Ops II out now and blowing it out of the water, why does this even exist? At least the first one had a market. It was a slower paced, cerebral shooter that was more interested in being a war drama than an action film. because of this, it didn't sell well. It was accused of being a lifeless shooting gallery by people who would rather have things blowing up in their face all the time. Well,a re you happy? You made this, MoH detractors. Danger Close listened and made the game they thought you wanted. Are you happy now? You're Doing It Wrong, guys. Stop destroying originality. You did it MoH, you did it to Sleeping Dogs, you did it to Spec Ops. Don't bitch about CoD if you want to shoot down anything that isn't CoD. That is all.

PS Has no one at Danger Close seen women or children before? Because whatever those abominations are in game, they are not women or children.

PPS Seriously, never use Preacher again. With so many interesting character to choose from from the first game, you choose the one guy with a personality of mud. Great job.

PPPS Thank you, Treyarch, for continuing to revolutionise and innovate Call of Duty while Infinity War seems happy to make the same game over and over.