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Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault Preview

By Andrew Park, GameSpotPosted Sep 11, 2003 3:18 pm PT

The next PC game in the Medal of Honor series will take place in the Pacific Rim.

EA's Medal of Honor series has made a name for itself by featuring exciting, fast-paced, realistic World War II action, as well as providing accessible, easy-to-learn gameplay. Though the franchise has given rise to numerous excellent games--that take place in various European theaters of war--the development teams decided some time ago to head east to cover the Allied assault on the Pacific Rim. Pacific Assault chronicles the career of a single soldier and his buddies on a campaign that takes them to Guadalcanal, Papua, and Makin Atoll, and eventually to the climactic and bloody battle for the tiny island of Tarawa in 1943.

You can expect to see realistic team tactics in Pacific Assault.

With the new game, the team at EALA wanted to accomplish several tasks, like including realistic squad tactics for US and Japanese soldiers and implementing realistic physics to make Medal of Honor look better than ever before. To this end, the team decided to develop a brand-new game engine from the ground up, along with a little extra help from Havok physics. At this point in time, the game engine has all its features in place, and the team is now looking to build levels and other content into the game. Yet, even now, what is in place looks extremely impressive.

Pacific Assault features huge, complex outdoor environments. Of course, they have to be, considering that much of the territory in the war effort consisted of jungles and islands all surrounded by water and dense foliage. The game's complex physics engine features realistic water effects that cause water not only to look shiny and reflective but also to behave realistically. Shooting at the surface of water kicks up spray and a network of ripples; a flock of waterfowl flying past will also ripple the surface. Many bodies of water actually have currents that drags objects (and players) when caught in them.

These advanced physics also extend to physical objects. There's realistic high grass that sways in the wind, parts when characters walk through it, and waves about as the result of grenade explosion shockwaves. The physics also allow for wooden bridges to be blown to pieces by grenades--causing planks of wood to plunge into the water only to bounce back and bob along the surface. The engine actually accounts for weight. The game also uses Havok physics to simulate rag-doll animations for downed soldiers who tumble to the ground when shot, or hurtle through the air if caught in the blast radius of a grenade or land mine.

When the team tactics fail, you can expect to see rag-doll death animations.

Pacific Assault uses fairly complex special effects that have been compiled by designers with expertise in both games and motion pictures. The team uses modern-day 3D software to render complicated explosions that consist of many smaller effects (flames, gouts of smoke, and clouds of dust on the ground). These are then added to the game engine, and each explosion is presented in real time. In some of the later levels, you see explosions and gunfire all over the place. However, we were assured that the game is still playable on midrange computers with decent graphics cards. Pacific Assault also gives your sound card a workout. The Medal of Honor series has always made a name for itself with its fantastic and highly realistic sound effects. The new game continues this tradition and has been developed with even more in-depth sound recordings. These recordings were not only completed on location in various parts of Japan and the Pacific islands, but they were also carried out by using multiple real-world weapons on closed shooting ranges.

These new changes are intended to help progress Medal of Honor beyond its previous reliance on scripted events--the exciting, action-packed scripted events that were always identical when you played. Instead, a lot of what goes on in Medal of Honor is "procedural." That is, gameplay happens in real time, as determined by the engine and not by any sort of premade sequence. This even holds true for the game's impressive squad AI.

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