MEDAL OF HONOR
Why It Isn’t Working So Well
Because the Medal of Honor series is as dead as a rock. The chances of another Medal of Honor game coming out anytime soon are only slightly higher than those of Half-Life 3 releasing within the next fifty years. For a long, long time, Medal of Honor was one of the most beloved and well-respected first person shooter franchises. It used to be a trailblazing series, to the extent that even Call of Duty was by and large considered to be just another pretender to the throne. The Medal of Honor mania fizzled out, though, with a string of releases that were decent at best and atrocious at worst. EA did, to their credit, try to rekindle the franchise with a reboot in 2010, but that game was utterly forgettable, while its sequel, Warfighter, was offensively horrible. Sadly enough, that was also the last we ever saw of this once-great series. The success of EA’s very own Battlefield also means that they probably won’t need to come back to Medal of Honor anytime soon, seeing as they already have a supremely successful megaton franchise to fall back on in the FPS genre.
How It Could Be Better
WITH EA DICE
This is perhaps the most obvious choice out of all ten of the entries in this feature. While it is the insane success of the Battlefield series that bodes so badly for the future of Medal of Honor, it is that very success that leads us to believe that DICE are perhaps the perfect developers for a new game in the classic shooter franchise. Because Battlefield accomplishes everything that EA may have wanted Medal of Honor to accomplish in a market obsessed with Call of Duty, and it does it better than they could have ever thought possible. A Medal of Honor game running on Frostbite, free of technical faults, and providing both, an addictive competitive multiplayer experience, as well as a solid single player campaign- it sounds, at least on paper, like a winning formula. It’s easier said than done, of course, and there’s the case to be made that there wouldn’t be much to separate such a game from so many direct competitors on the market, Battlefield itself included- but if there’s a developer that can bring back Medal of Honor to its former glory, it’s DICE.
