We’ve all heard (and many of us have made) the Medal of Honour: Warfighter naming jokes – my favourites so far are Medal of Honor: Punch Courier and Medal of Honor: Regional Supervisor for Violence – but aside from the stupid title, is anything in the latest update worth writing home about?
CERTAIN DOORS
I watched a demo session on Wednesday as part of EA’s April showcase, and I’m not shitting you in the slightest – not the tiniest amount of shit – when I tell you these are the two new features outlined to us, the actual gaming press, in a five-minute presentation:
ONE You can turn your gun sideways. Not in a gangster-kinda way, but to use a slightly different sight to shoot people at different ranges. Yeah, that’s right, just like in Call of Effing Duty
TWO You can open “certain” doors yourself with one of three opening options
That’s, um, that’s it. I asked around to see if I missed anything really worth writing home about in the first thirty seconds of the demo – maybe troops were get dropped into battle by mythical pegasi or their guns were powered solely by their own sense of self-worth or they’d integrated a revolutionary new dubstep-powered shield* system – but, apparently, no. That was all.
BUMBLE AMIABLY
That ability to open doors is a step in the right direction, though – throughout the entirety of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, there was almost no point in turning up as your immediate superiors would handle all the heavy lifting such as plot, decisions, or talking and leave you to bumble amiably through each level, spitting indiscriminate death out of your swollen bangstick of choice.
The demo showed us an entrenched position complete with a heavy machine gun emplacement that generic brown people of the day were using to shoot our charmingly multiracial team of elite spec ops – it was possible to assault it head on, but we could also form up and move through a nearby door to take ’em by surprise.
Options for opening the door included, and I’m assuming are limited to:
– Kicking the door open, and shooting everyone
– Opening the door quietly and throwing in a flashbang, then shooting everyone
– Blowing the door open with an explosive charge, then shooting everyone
There’s a fourth option on the menu, but I think that’s just “Cancel” and doesn’t really count as a way of opening a door. I couldn’t tell due to the speed over which the demo guy flicked over the screen – it might have been an option to knock on the door, wait until they open it, and then appear behind them like Droopy Dawg in an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Only time will tell.
RENDERED MOOT
This is all rendered moot, by the way, as when they finally make it into the room, the machine gunner is killed by your mates running through the front door and shooting him up. But it was a nice idea – having the option to open doors and explore levels in a different way is always worthwhile.
It’s not enough though, by a long shot. The fact that you have doors in your game – and the option to open them! – shouldn’t be the thing you want journos to take away from the experience and write snarky little articles like this one. It’s a sad state of affairs that this is the new thing that MoA:WF is touting as vibrant and interesting, considering how one of the first commands you input in Zork is OPEN DOOR.
Although it wasn’t KICK OPEN DOOR, so I guess we’re getting somewhere.
* Actually – someone, make this happen. I’d buy it. Especially it is was just a version of bullet time where it became more powerful and the beats got filthier and wubbier the more guys you killed and OH SHIT GENTLEMEN WE HAVE OURSELVES A GAME
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