Medal of Honor Q&A Feature

Following a brief hiatus, EA's Medal of Honor series is making a big comeback later this year.  Switching from the traditional WW2 setting to the present day conflict in Afghanistan, TVG recently had the opportunity to put a few questions to the game's Sr. Creative Director Richard Farrelly.


TVG: The announcement made heavy references to the Tier-1 Operators...

Richard Farrelly: Nice beard by the way.  [It should be pointed out that Gwynne has facial hair that would make even the cover soldier envious - ed]

Thanks for that. I'm also going bald, which kind of cancels it all out unfortunately, but back onto the question:  there's not a lot known about the Tier 1 Operators; even Google didn't seem to know about them when the game was officially announced.  Can you give us any background information?

I think to really identify it... lots of media show highly elite units or individuals, your Jason Bournes and whatever.  What we're doing is, we found the actual people that some of these fictional characters are patterned from and we wanted to depict them in a very authentic light.  We want you to experience the story of one of these really exceptional humans.

Working with them has been really great because they've given us insight into the real story, as much as they can obviously, because some of them are still active.  Some of them are still doing their jobs, and so there's certain things that they can't tell us because it would either jeopardise their mission, their personal safety or the safety of their brethren.

But there's certain things they can talk about and everything they say to us helps the game and helps us to tell their story more accurately.

Obviously Afghanistan is an ongoing conflict, it's controversial, particularly in terms of politics and corruption; do you have any concerns that a game could trivialise such a sensitive and current operation?

It would be foolish to say we're not considering it, obviously it's a sensitive subject.  When we approached it we picked the locale because of the nature of where these guys were and we're telling their story.

So we were aware of the challenges that came with that, so for us politics doesn't enter it, there's no statement being made here and we're very careful of that.  What we really want to do is tell these guys' story, a fictional story, and make it about what these guys are doing in that location and not so much about who started it or whose agenda.

I always use the comparison that a lot of other media have done that in recent years, they're covering current conflicts in central Asia or Iraq and so I think as long as you approach it with the correct amount of respect and sensitivity then we have the right as artists to do that.

With that in mind, how close can it get; there's obviously a lot in the media about wrongdoings both on behalf of the insurgents and on the allied forces; can you portray this or is it something you're sticking clear of?

There's certain things that we can call out and there's certain things that are better left unsaid because you can watch the news for that.  Whatever plays to our goal of creating an authentic experience we draw from, and everything else, again we're not trying to create controversy, we're not trying to be sensationalist.  Mission one for us is telling the soldiers' story as authentically as possible and everything is fired to that point.

Medal of Honor is traditionally associated with World War 2, however the reboot obviously brings this into the present day; was this a reaction to the saturation of WW2 or the craze around Modern Warfare?

There's a bunch of factors involved.  Part of it is just that the natural progression that it took for us to say 'ok, we're going to work with these Tier-1 Operators, where do they work?'  They don't work in World War 2 they work in the current day in Afghanistan.  But I think there's also an appeal.  People ask 'is World War 2 done to death?'  I don't think so, but maybe people need a break from it.

Why do people like Modern Warfare, why does our audience like that?  Well if you look at that demographic it's very technology influenced, the culture, from mobile phones to surfing the internet to satellite feeds, all this stuff.  So I think there's an appeal of playing somebody in a game that has access to all of that hardware and technology and be able to bring that as well as the traditional bullets down a range.

My personal opinion is that regardless of the setting or backdrop, if it's a great game then it's a great game, I think peoples' complaints fall away at that point and recognise it for what it is.

I'm genuinely stunned by what I saw today, I was expecting to see something similar to Modern Warfare, but it's a hard formula to do well.  The sprawling vistas when you're painting lasers seems incredibly staged and directed, you feel like you're part of a squad, with the prompting from the spec-ops; it's carefully controlled yet seems open.  How difficult is that to achieve?

Well there's a couple of things.  First you've got to know what you want to do, from trial-and-error by the way, and it really helps to have these guys saying, 'we wouldn't do it that way'.  But that didn't come until a little later, so we start with: what do we want to convey here and how are we going to do it? Then you build that first.

Then you play it.  The way I played it today was the way we as designers say 'ok this is how I want to play this', this is the ideal depiction of this event.  Some players don't want to do it like that, some don't want to hang around for a sequence to complete, some of the things that require maybe a little bit of patience.  As responsible developers we have to be able to support everybody who plays our game equally.

That said, you can roll in to that level and start gunning everybody down, just like in real life there's consequences to those actions and you find yourself in a firefight that you might struggle to win or you're getting reviewed by your peers, which is something that they would actually do.  When we speak to these guys they say they're like a wolf pack, the weak don't survive, if you mess it up you're out and we can't afford to have you as a liability on our team.  So if you start doing things contrary to what the mission is they'll be letting you know.  It's another one of those layered elements that we put into the game to make you feel like this is a different group of guys.

I was impressed by the set-pieces featured in today's demonstration, particularly when the squad was taking cover before the assault.  Can you elaborate on how you stage these sequences, allowing player choice but also staging the events?

That's a byproduct of making squad games.  When you're crafting the environments you have to make sure there's cover for everybody, you have to have that one piece of sweet cover that's reserved for the player.  We always want the player to have the best vantage point and once you've decided where that is, which is usually the highest probability that the player will gravitate towards, we craft the entire scene around that because that's the most likely place for you to be.

You can never guarantee that, otherwise we might as well put you on-rails for the entire game, have A/B, go that way, like Dragon's Lair or something.  It's all predictive, here's where we think the player's going to be, when we think it's going to be.  We try to time the events, it's a very iterative process to get that.

Like I said before, the player might just blow past that point and start shooting, so we have to have switches that turn that off and have a conditional event if that occurs, the 'what-if' moment.  That's where the difficulty comes in, how much you branch from that.

Medal of Honor is set in Afghanistan and this year's Call of Duty is rumoured to take place in Vietnam, both controversial conflicts, do you have any opinion on the choices?

I can offer our view, but no comment on anything our competitors might be doing or what they've chosen.  For us, obviously it's a sensitive subject, you have to approach it in the right way, but I always think it's as controversial as you choose to make it.

For us it's the story of a soldier and not the story of politics, it's not the story of one person's opinion or another.  This is the reality of what these guys do on a day-to-day basis in the theatre of war.  It just so happens to be that Afghanistan in the present day is where these guys are operating, so it should be true to Medal of Honor's credo of authenticity, to tell the soldier's story.

That said, we approached this in the most sensitive and respectful way possible.  We work with the branches of the military that we're representing, and we're certainly respectful to the other parties involved as well when we craft these moments.  It's all geared around the drama of this fictional story.

Medal of Honor is a reboot for the series, presumably there must be plans for further titles; have you considered any other setting moving forwards?

I can't comment on any future decision as to what characters, locales, or context, but what I can say is that the franchise has been around for a little over ten years now so there's no danger of it going away anytime soon.  This Medal of Honor is going to do a lot to revive the brand and get it back into the mainstream.

You've obviously got single-player and multiplayer covered, any chances of seeing co-op support?

I can't comment on that.

DICE are working on the multiplayer, does having the two teams on different sides of the Atlantic pose any problems and do you have any concerns about a lack of cohesion between the two modes?

No.  We don't expect there to be continuity, we want DICE to do what they do best and make a great multiplayer game for Medal of Honor.  The overlap will come with what we're representing in terms of the Tier-1 Operator and today's war; all of that permeates through the Medal of Honor pantheon.

They do what they do, they do it on their technology; we do what we do, on our technology.  What this provides is for us to concentrate on what we do and bring it to the level of quality it needs to be at and still be able to deliver a high quality multiplayer product.  As long as you're upfront about that and you're not trying to achieve the impossible goal of complete parity.

The reality is we're on two different technologies and there are going to be differences rather than try to make excuses for it or camouflage that.  It is what it is and that actually makes the whole product better because we can excel in both areas.


TVG would like to thank Richard Farrelly and EA for the opportunity to take a first look at Medal of Honor and answering our questions.  Expect more on the title shortly.