'Leadership' cited for Medal of Honor: Warfighter woes

The dismal reception for Medal of Honor: Warfighter and its predecessor forced publisher Electronic Arts to put the franchise on hold. The company places the blames squarely on its shoulders, saying that leadership was at issue, not a glut of World War II games.

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The dismal reception for Medal of Honor: Warfighter and its predecessor forced publisher Electronic Arts to put the franchise on hold. The company places the blames squarely on its shoulders, saying that leadership was at issue, not a glut of World War II games.

"I think a key part of this is having the right amount of high-quality production talent," EA Chief Creative Director Rich Hilleman told RPS. "And we didn't have the quality of leadership we needed to make [Medal of Honor] great. ... In the long term, we have to make sure we don't kill those products by trying to do them when we can't do them well."

He said that the company is focused on Battlefield for now as "the one great thing in that space," but said the series should eventually make a return. "We don't think its a genre problem," he said. "It's an execution problem. We don't think Medal of Honor's performance speaks to any particular bias in that space against modern settings or World War II or any of that. It's much more that we had some things we should've done better."

Contributing Editor
From The Chatty
  • reply
    February 12, 2013 5:00 PM

    John Keefer posted a new article, 'Leaderhip' cited for Medal of Honor: Warfighter woes.

    The dismal reception for Medal of Honor: Warfighter and its predecessor forced publisher Electronic Arts to put the franchise on hold. The company places the blames squarely on its shoulders, saying that leadership was at issue, not a glut of World War II games.

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      February 12, 2013 5:09 PM

      Leaderhip and not leadership?

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        February 12, 2013 5:44 PM

        I love you Shack, but this really is one of the most typo-prone websites I've ever visited.

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        February 12, 2013 5:45 PM

        A glut of World War II games? .... more like a glut of modern settings yes? If it was WWII it may have done better IMO, World at War is still my fav.

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          February 12, 2013 6:36 PM

          Dude, where were you a few years ago when everyone was bitching about WWII shooters?

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          February 12, 2013 6:58 PM

          There was a time from like 2003 to 2007 where every new game announcement was some new WWII shooter.

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      February 13, 2013 1:56 AM

      Give me a WW2 shooter, to hell with modern noobware.

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      February 13, 2013 9:08 AM

      Note that there was no blame placed on compressing development into a 20-month timeframe, to the point where MoH 2010's multiplayer had to be made by DICE, and was ultimately derided as "Battlefield 3 Lite, with a bad ultra-scripted Unreal Engine 3 single-player game duct-taped to it". And then, with Warfighter, going whole hog on fake "authenticity" with the Zero Dark Thirty quasi-tie-in, and calling in Black Box for a driving game section.

      With the "reincarnation" of the EA LA FPS division into "Danger Close", there was far too much misguided hubris, and no project leads or executives seemed to display humility until Warfighter crashed and burned. Danger Close could potentially make a great smaller-scale FPS, but they're being weighed down by being forced to chase after Call of Duty 4 (hell, even Activision can't chase after CoD4, by Eric Hirshberg's admission to investors).

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      February 13, 2013 9:24 AM

      What glut of ww2 games? I cant think of a single one that was released in the last few years. Was warfighter set in WW2? Why did the author of the article bring up ww2 at all?

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        February 13, 2013 12:40 PM

        There's Red Orchestra 2, though I only see EA mentioning ww2 in the article.

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