Does Medal of Honor Still Need Multiplayer?

I had this thought even before actually playing a little bit of the PC beta this past week.  Even after playing it though I’m starting to think that maybe this franchise should drop its multiplayer, both for the sake of its own newfound direction and EA’s own pipeline.

I’ll admit now that this is my first Medal of Honor game ever, but from what I understand this is pretty much EA’s main first person shooter franchise.  In the RPG world Namco has Tales of, Sega has Phantasy Star, and Konami has (had?) Suikoden.  In shooters Activision now has Call of Duty, Sony has Killzone, Microsoft has Halo, etcetera.

Well, EA already has a shooter franchise that’s actually doing a fine job of competing on the multiplayer end: Battlefield.  Bad Company 2 is just different enough from Modern Warfare 2 that it speaks to generally the same crowd, but attracts an audience that wants something different.  On top of that the Vietnam expansion is coming out this winter as if in competition with Black Ops.  What place does Medal of Honor multiplayer have here?

Essentially, what I played in the beta felt like Call of Duty running on the Frostbyte engine with slightly different modes.  It was like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but without the vehicles and large maps that set it apart from COD.  Squeezed in-between those two franchises as well as a new Halo game, I’m not sure Medal of Honor multiplayer can survive.

Maybe EA just needs some time to adjust.  Up until very recent years Battlefield was mainly a PC franchise – the old console entries like Modern Combat definitely being second-tier.  Maybe Medal of Honor has traditionally filled the console shooter space for EA.

Now however, DICE has finally gotten Battlefield to work on consoles with Bad Company 2, 1943, and eventually Battlefield 3 – a beta for which will come with the Medal of Honor limited edition.  EA has two military fps franchises on their hands on the same platforms.  What sense does that make?  EA even assigning DICE to MoH’s multiplayer is kind of an admission of this problem.

On top of that though is the controversy which speaks to the kind of singleplayer game EA LA is trying to make here.

I personally disagree that removing the word “Taliban” from the multiplayer (it’s staying in the singleplayer in case you didn’t pick up on that) infringes on the game’s status as expression or something like that.  The new singleplayer game here is supposed to be a serious, faithful (but probably not mechanically realistic) look at what went down in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002.  It might not be a stretch to call it a docudrama in game form, and it would be the first one I’ve heard of, especially in the mainstream channel.  But the multiplayer I saw in the beta doesn’t do anything to drive that.

A title that tries to be as serious as Medal of Honor is trying to be shouldn’t be “just a game” or “just fun,” but that’s precisely what the multiplayer is.  It’s really a more advanced form of kids playing with Super Soakers.  Being able to play as the Taliban in something like that, attached to a product like this, is what got the U.S. Military angry. 

Removing the word “Taliban” from the multiplayer does nothing to the singleplayer’s integrity because they are two separate things with two separate objectives.  In fact, the most interesting part about the multiplayer beta for me was the loading screen descriptions for each map that actually gave a tiny bit of insight into Afghanistan’s history and geography.

I am at least going to rent Medal of Honor because I really appreciate what the singleplayer is trying to do.  I am tired of how Call of Duty and practically every other modern-themed military shooter these days has to make up a 24-esque scenario for fear of pissing off the media.  Stories of the current conflict are freely told in every medium except games, and it’s about time we had a game that isn’t afraid to take place in the real world.

If a game is going to do this and have a straight face about it, EA needs to realize that all the aspects of the “fun box product” may not be compatible with the endeavor.  Every shooter doesn’t need multiplayer because the market for them on consoles is dominated by a handful of games – one of them already published by EA themselves.