Medal of Honor franchise no longer part of EA's 'rotation'

The Medal of Honor series is apparently being put on hold.

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The Medal of Honor series is apparently being put on hold. Although the 2010 reboot of EA's FPS series was successful for the company, its follow-up was not. 2012's Warfighter met lackluster reviews, and equally dismal sales. According to EA, the title performed "well below our expectations."

EA COO Peter Moore said that "the game was solid but the focus on combat authenticity did not resonate with consumers. Critics were polarized and gave the game scores which were, frankly, lower than it deserved."

"This one is behind us now. We are taking Medal of Honor out of the rotation, and have a plan to bring year-over-year continuity to our shooter offerings," he said. With Danger Close's FPS tabled, it appears EA is placing even more weight behind the Battlefield franchise.

Andrew Yoon was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    January 30, 2013 2:45 PM

    Andrew Yoon posted a new article, Medal of Honor franchise no longer part of EA's 'rotation'.

    The Medal of Honor series is apparently being put on hold.

    • reply
      January 30, 2013 2:47 PM

      What do you mean by "Although the 2010 reboot of EA's FPS series was successful for the company" and then "2012's Warfighter met lackluster reviews, and equally dismal sales"? How exactly was it successful if it didn't sell well?

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      January 30, 2013 3:09 PM

      well looking forward to BF4 anyway.

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      January 30, 2013 3:18 PM

      Take it back to WW2

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        January 30, 2013 3:53 PM

        Well, I guess it's been long enough since people complained about the glut of WW2 games!

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          January 30, 2013 3:59 PM

          could do korean war. i don't remember any games about the korean war.

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        January 30, 2013 4:07 PM

        No; I have a feeling that they'd get that wrong, too. I think that Danger Close should start working on something far more original, far lower budget, with NO cutscenes, NO driving sequences outsourced to Black Box, and NO Hollywood film actor voice acting. Even Activision's leapfrog studios are starting to get shaky, with critical reception of MW3 and BLOPS2 slightly worse than that of MW2 and BLOPS1 (despite sales continuing to increase; even though sales is "the only number that counts on the balance sheet", Infinity Ward and Treyarch look like they're running out of tricks in the book).

        The era of the ultra-high-budget roller-coaster-rails ultra-cinematic first-person-shooter has passed for everyone except Activision. Two major components of THQ's implosion were putting the uDraw out on 360 and PS3, and spending an insane amount of money on marketing and developing Homefront. EA's year last year was less dire, but still not good, with BioWare essentially losing their magic, Star Wars: The Old Republic tanking, and Medal of Honor landing with a giant splat in late October 2012, two years after Medal of Honor 2010 was met with reviews of, "This janky ultra-scripted stuff is not fulfilling, and DICE was wasting their time that could've been better spent on Battlefield 3." EA wasn't even confident enough to send out pre-release review copies, because the game was buggy, had a massive day-one patch, and was still buggy AFTER the day-one patch. The Giant Bomb crew got their copy of the game with a stack of pizzas, and a few sheets of day-one patch notes.

        It's sad, because there hasn't been much in the FPS space (especially the PC FPS space) that isn't aping Call of Duty (or isn't Call of Duty). Dishonored is a breath of fresh air, though it's far from a fast-paced game, so it doesn't scratch that itch. If you didn't want to get stuck with UPlay, you couldn't play Far Cry 3. My favorite 2012 FPS game of the year was a $5 indie game called Receiver.

        EA had a GAAP loss of $45M for Q3FY2013 (ending December 31, 2012), but that's better than the $205M loss a year ago. Still, the whipping boy for this earnings call was Medal of Honor.

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        January 31, 2013 5:52 AM

        Take it back to WW1

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      January 30, 2013 5:06 PM

      There's probably a design doc that has a way to make MOH work but EA's top brass insisting on making the Dr. Thunder to Activision's Dr. Pepper wasn't ever going to cut it.

      I don't know if it was a case of Danger Close not having the technical/design talent to make a quality competitor to COD or EA insisting on a hard october deadline, but something went wrong with the way they made MOH 2010 and Warfighter.

      Will EA learn from their mistakes? I doubt it. BF4 will be out this October come hell or high water. It will suffer from a boring singleplayer with scripting problems out the wazoo. The multiplayer will be good and it will offer a different kind of game experience to this year's COD but only slightly so this time because they'll have put more effort into getting close quarters infantry action up to the level of the competition.

      They'll use the ex IW team's game as the other game in the annual rotation. And the cycle will continue....

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        January 30, 2013 5:46 PM

        I'm half-amazed that Respawn has been able to maintain radio silence for this long, but yeah, it would be advantageous for their project to be ready for Holiday 2013, with an unveiling in April 2013. I just hope it's not another heavily-scripted corridor shooter.

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          January 30, 2013 8:04 PM

          I've loved everything Respawn has done from MOH: Allied Assault to CoD4, but have they done anything beyond the heavily-scripted corridor shooter? I really miss the FPS's of old. BF3 is really the only one that's stayed strong as far as the MP side of things.

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        January 30, 2013 8:53 PM

        Their tech and tools also probably played a part in that.

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          January 30, 2013 10:26 PM

          They were using the same tech as Battlefield 3, which was a very successful title.

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            January 30, 2013 10:58 PM

            Yea but the frostbite tech wasn't designed to do the same things Cod does well. Mainly 60 fps and tools that give designers way more control over geometry and game code / script. Also the animations in frostbite seem to not transition as smoothly from AI behavior to scripted behavior and back again. Not sure if that's on the anim system side, anim content, or script.

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      January 31, 2013 4:38 AM

      2012 actually wasn't terrible, but it's so short I'd be furious if I paid $60 for it.

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      January 31, 2013 6:27 PM

      Hopefullt Bf4 doesn't fail as miserably at being a decent game as Bf4 did.

      Wouldn't mind a return to WW2 at this point.

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      February 4, 2013 9:01 AM

      MOH 2010 was good, 2012 just couldnt stand up to the titles being released. There was too many games coming out in that 2 month time frame for everyone to pick them all up. 2012 needed to be tweaked but all in all it was a good game. It sucks no one plays any more.

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      April 11, 2013 9:53 AM

      You can Download this game for free from Mygame9.com
      go for it guys now

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