Shooters protagonist Terry Glass isn’t that different from the kind of character you’d play in a Medal of Honor, Battlefield or Call of Duty game. He’s a fictional American soldier fighting in the geopolitical hotspots where America’s armed forces face off against disparate, tough-to-pin-down threats.
War is hell, and it never changes. Even when game developers promise to depict the more human side of military conflict, it all boils down to shooting other people as close to the face as possible.
There couldn’t have been a better time for this panel. Tuesday brought the eyebrow-arching news that Lt. Col Oliver North was a special guest celebrity consultant of the next Call of Duty. And Friday, former Kotaku editor-in-chief Brian Crecente was on a panel with a Navy captain at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Really, EA, do you have to make the first gameplay footage for the next Medal of Honor game so damn dark, huh? We know the Frostbite 2 engine that the game’s being built on can do all sorts of wonderful, amazing-looking things but we need to be able to see said things.
So, the upcoming Medal of Honor is still trying to say it’s authentic while showing Call of Duty-esque blockbuster moments. Some things will never change, but some things do, like a lot of the trimmings and context of this reboot’s sequel.
The latest update from Medal of Honor: Warfighter is out. The first video to be released features the military operatives are as deadly as ever. They’ll come for you in the dark, water, and in between the trees.
Every now and then a soldier will write about the obvious differences between war, and the portrayal of war in video games. This article is almost like that, but the brutal honesty, the matter of fact way in which war is depicted, is unnerving. According to ex-soldier ‘W’ “[h]eroes in a frontline combat context do not exist”.
We have a clubhouse leader for stupidest triple-A game name of 2012, and it’s at least seven months from release. Medal of Honor: Warfighter.
Between this official art (released by EA alongside confirmation of reports from earlier today) and the name, which isn’t just funny but is also part of an existing, competing series, we’re getting dangerously close to self-parody land here.
