Medal of Honor: Airborne First Look
Just when you thought there was nothing new under the sun in the World War II genre, EA's LA studio is putting a unique spin on its storied shooter series.
Get the full scoop on MOH Airborne--and see the exclusive first gameplay footage--in this developer interview.
There's no doubting the continuous popularity of the World War II first-person shooter, but you couldn't exactly say the genre has driven innovation in the last few years. The typical WWII game presents a linearly designed level that relies on you following a path from a start point to an end point, and it peppers that path with hand-placed enemies and scripted action sequences that rely on you to approach them from the front, just as the designers intended. That traditional sort of design is well and good, but Electronic Arts' LA studio has had enough. With Medal of Honor: Airborne--the latest entry in the long-running WWII franchise that arguably kicked off the genre--the developers intend to do away with that linear mission structure in favor of a more dynamic experience that will hopefully give diehard fans of the genre something new to think about.
The big difference between Airborne and past WWII games--especially those in the Medal of Honor series itself--is that the new game's missions don't have specific start and end points at all. If you looked at the levels in past MOH games as resembling a line, the ones in Airborne are more like a circle. But let's back up a bit. As the title implies, the new game places you in the role of a paratrooper who's part of the Allied airborne forces that dropped behind enemy lines, often in advance of the main, ground-based invasion force, throughout the European theater of the war. Every level will thus begin with you and a bunch of other paratroopers squeezed into a C-47, awaiting the inevitable drop that begins your mission.
You only have look control while you're in the plane, so you can at least observe the nervous precombat chatter of your comrades. But the gameplay doesn't really start until you hit the open air. You'll be able to see the entire mission area below you, and as soon as you deploy your chute, you'll be able to control your descent to choose where you land on the battlefield. And this is where Airborne really diverges from the WWII pack, because your choice of landing points will determine how the mission proceeds. Each mission will have around a dozen objectives, some of which must be tackled in a set order, but how and from which direction you come at these objectives will be up to you. The specified drop zone will be visible from the air, and while your allies will always follow their orders and land in the zone, you can land anywhere--on rooftops, on towers, in the streets--and approach the tasks of each mission as you see fit. Then again, when three dozen Nazi soldiers stand between you and your goal, fighting it out solo may not be the best idea.
EA played a demo for us set during the famed Operation Husky--in which the Allies led a very costly invasion of Sicily that took two years to prepare for--so we could see how all this is coming together. You won't be able to draw a weapon while you're dropping, so your attention will be focused entirely on where you're going to hit the dirt. It sounds like there will be some finesse involved in landing smoothly, because if you flare or cut your chute at the wrong time, you'll hit the ground too hard or you'll need extra time to get out of your gear. But if you perform a perfect landing, you'll have your weapon at the ready almost the instant your feet touch down. Some objectives will be set in stone, while others will be rolled out based on where you are and what you're doing in the level--but luckily, if you're killed before you complete any goals, you'll restart in the plane so you can try a different landing strategy the next time around.
Since you can begin a mission from anywhere on the battlefield, and since there are no scripted action sequences, Airborne's developers have been forced to create a more robust artificial intelligence system for the soldiers on both sides of the battle. All AI characters will have an awareness of affordances in the environment, which are simply features of the terrain or urban infrastructure that provide a tactical advantage. This can range from taking cover behind some crates to using an alleyway as a choke point--but the point is, the soldiers you're fighting (and the ones you're fighting with) will theoretically take intelligent combat actions based on their surroundings.
Furthermore, Airborne will track the tug-of-war battlefield dynamics between the two sides throughout the entire level, not just where you're currently fighting. You can pop up a tactical map of the level that indicates different types of friendly and enemy units, which move around on the map in real time as they push each other back. The game won't respawn an infinite number of enemies to stymie you; rather, you'll have to clear out and hold a territory to stop the enemy from appearing. We saw an unexpected example of this during our demo, when we stopped to examine an unrelated gameplay feature. As the player idled for a couple of minutes, a group of enemy soldiers advanced on and reclaimed their previous position, nullifying the progress the player and his AI allies had made. According to executive producer Patrick Gilmore, you can think of all this a little like a real-time strategy game unfolding from a first-person shooter perspective.
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Medal of Honor: Airborne Review
The single-player campaign doesn't get cooking until the last two levels, but those two levels combined with solid multiplayer make it worth enlisting in Airborne.
- Sep 4, 2007
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- Release: Sep 4, 2007 »
- ESRB: Teen
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