In conversation with Eurogamer, Söderlund stated that “Danger Close as it was doesn’t exist anymore. There are people who left L.A., people who work with DICE L.A., and there are some who work in other parts of EA, as always when something gets dismantled.”

DICE L.A. will be helping the main DICE developer, based in Stockholm, in support-related roles. For example, if they work on Battlefield 4, Mirror’s Edge and Star Wars: Battlefront, then DICE L.A. will work on expansion packs and other premium services.

“It’s a way for us to expand the DICE universe, to be able to do more. They are helping. Who knows where this will take them long term? Right now they’re focused on helping.

“Frankly, it’s about talent. Where can we find the right talent and people we think have critical skills we need? When you’re in Sweden, Stockholm is a gigantic gaming city with DICE and Mojang and all the other companies, but we realised we needed to extend our reach if we wanted to get to the breadth of talent we wanted.

“Since the DICE LA announcement we had a lot of pressure on that studio from people who want to come work there. And after E3, as you can probably imagine, there will be more.”

Yesterday, EA announced that it was closing down social games developer Playfish. When contacted by Videogamer, EA refused to comment on the status of Danger Close. The studio has seen a large number of staff leave in the past few months including studio head Greg Goodrich. The official Medal of Honor Twitter hasn’t been updated since February end either.

Responding to Videogamer’s requests, EA Corporate Communications’ Tiffany Steckler stated that, “EA is sharpening its focus to provide games for new platforms and mobile. In some cases, this involves reducing team sizes as we evolve into a more efficient organization. Unfortunately we don’t disclose impact on individual teams or locations.”

This is pretty much a general statement that was also used to comment on Playfish’s closure. Has Danger Close really been shut down? Stay tuned for more details.

So there you are: EA blatantly admits that they didn’t do a good job on Warfighter (or the series in general).

“I think a key part of this is having the right amount of high-quality production talent. And we didn’t have the quality of leadership we needed to make [Medal of Honor] great. We just have to get the leadership aligned.

“We’re blessed to have more titles than we can do well today. That’s a good problem, frankly. 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.”

In the meantime, EA will be pouring more effort into Battlefield. Hilleman stated that we might see Medal of Honor return in the future though.

Source: GIBiz

As Polygon reports, Moore said as much during an investor call today. “We struggled with two challenges: the slowdown that impacted the entire sector and poor critical and commercial reception for Medal of Honor Warfighter. Medal of Honor was an obvious miss. 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.”

Whether this means the franchise is officially over and done with, or simply put on hold, is not totally clear. But we won’t be seeing a new Medal of Honor game for a while, that’s for sure.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter was released last year to a torrent of negative reviews due to its monotonous gameplay, poor design and played out mechanics.

Players can access two new maps with the Darra Gun Market and Chitral Compound along with six new weapon configurations, 14 new weapon camouflage skins, and 10 new multiplayer ranks. The fact that $1 from each pack sold goes towards helping nonprofit veterans organizations is perhaps the icing on the cake.

The Hunt Map Pack can be picked up for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with the Deluxe Edition of Medal of Honor: Warfighter. More information to purchase it separately for players who already own the game will be incoming.

The theme of both properties is the same though: The hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Of course, the map pack is simply a multiplayer addition that adds two new areas – the Darra Gun Market and Chitral Compound – inspired by Navy Seal Team Six’s mission. Of course, there are also six new weapon configurations, 14 new weapon camouflage skins, and 10 new multiplayer ranks to go with the new maps.

And as if to make sure at least one decent thing comes out of the FPS, EA is donating $1 from every map pack sold to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation up through March 19th 2014 as part of its contribution to Project HONOR, which helps various nonprofit veterans organizations.

Source: News10

In this new developer diary, art director Chris Salazar delivers inside access for Medal of Honor Warfighter’s The Hunt Map Pack, which will come the Limited or Deluxe Editions at no extra cos. It features two maps – the Darra Gun Market and Chitral Compound – and is inspired by a certain decade-long hunt for a certain man (fill in the blanks yourself). Salazer takes to explaining the process behind bringing real-world hot-spots to the virtual world. As for the overall shoddy quality of the game? Not much discussion on that.

Stay tuned for more details on the DLC’s release.

Unfortunately, that is clearly not the case with Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Warfighter does not learn from the mistakes of its predecessor, which was criticized by many for being a CoD clone, and goes ahead and shoves you down one corridor after another, a barrage of scripted sequences you have no control over coming your way, cutscene after cutscene. While games like Black Ops and Modern Warfare manage their linearity rather well, Warfighter fails at being even a good linear game.

Other than being unbelievably restrictive- even more so than Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3’s campaign- Warfighter is just never fun. There is one particular chase sequence in a car that begins to show semblances of thrill and excitement, but even that fades away too quickly. The game seldom gives you much control over what you do, and when it does, it’s plain boring and dull.

Even the shooting doesn’t feel very satisfying, despite the fact that the sound effects and weapon design are spot-on, simply because of how dumb the enemy A.I is. They just stand their ground stupidly, their movements repetitive and predictable as they stick their heads over cover or start running around corners to charge at you. You never feel the rush of adrenaline and excitement you usually should in intense shootouts, because the shootouts in Warfighter just aren’t all that intense.

What doesn’t help is the story. Warfighter tries telling a story that talks more about the personal lives of Tier 1 operators than worldwide wars on terror, and it certainly tries to move you emotionally, but much like everything else you experience in the game, it falls flat. How can you care about the families of the characters that the game doesn’t bother to develop at all? How can you believe these Tier 1 operators are the good people they are being shown as when they’re shooting bullets and cracking skulls left, right and center? It’s obvious that the team at Danger Close has immense amounts of respect for these Tier 1 operatives. They’re just not able to show that very well in the game.

The multiplayer of Warfighter is where you might have a little bit of fun. It’s shooting actual people and winning points- of course it’s fun. And some of the modes are refreshingly innovative at times. However, the map design is awful, and the game gets really boring, really fast. Don’t expect to spend the twenty of hours of multiplayer gameplay here that you would in, say, Halo or Battlefield.

One area, though, where Warfighter truly shines and leaves no stone unturned is the visuals department. Usually when a game is as atrocious as Warfighter is, you start looking for niggles in everything the game does, but even the most cynical and critical people will find it hard to fault Warfighter for its visuals.

Having been built on Frostbite 2.0, you expect it to be something special, but Warfighter looks even better than Battlefield 3- that’s saying something. Everything from the lighting and particle effects to the detail in the animations and character models is done really well. And when you walk out of a dark corridor and into the open, and see the sun’s rays blinding your vision, to slowly get your eyesight back and see dust particles floating in the air in the aftermath of a recent explosion you caused, it’ll be hard not to gape.

Ultimately, however, Warfighter is a disappointment. We didn’t expect it to be the next Combat Evolved or Half-Life 2 or Crysis or Modern Warfare, but we did expect it to be enjoyable, to be at least a decent game. Unfortunately, Warfighter is none of those. With other better shooters coming out very soon, Warfighter is clearly not the title you should buy right now. Or ever, for that matter.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360

Medal of Honor: Warfighter got released a few days back, and it was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews from almost one and all. Very few critics didn’t criticize it all out, and even they had mixed feelings about the game.

EA officials have come out and said that they are “disappointed” with all the criticism their game has been getting.

While EA CEO John Riccitiello said the launch “is coming in below our expectations”, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau went on to say that he believes the game is better than what the reviews say.

“We’re disappointed with the critical reception,” said Gibeau. “Internal testing and mock reviews indicated that the game is better than the [Metacritic] score we have right now. We believe it is. However, we are seeing folks out there that just don’t like the game.”

Well, we didn’t expect them to be happy about it.

Our own review of Warfighter will be up soon. Stay tuned.

[IGN]

A new glitch for the recently released (and bashed) Medal of Honor: Warfighter has come up, and apparently, it’s preventing players from unlocking certain achievements.

Uncovered on forums of Xbox360Achievements, the glitch prevents the players from unlocking the following achievements even if they do all the stuff that is required of them: ‘Squad Leader’ achievement, for which you have to unlock a unit in each class, the ‘Global Warfighters’ achievement for which you have to unlock a soldier from each unit, and the ‘Warchief’ achievement for unlocking all soldiers in multiplayer.

Joystiq says that while this issue is mostly persistent in the Xbox 360 version of the game, it’s cropping up on the PS3 as well.

EA hasn’t issued any statement regarding this so far, but we’ll keep you updated.

Have you encountered this glitch? Tell us in your comments below.