Medal of Honor Pacific Assault Designer Diary #4
Senior producer Matt Powers explains the vision behind the multiplayer gameplay in Medal of Honor Pacific Assault.
In Medal of Honor Pacific Assault, EA's World War II-era series heads to the warm waters--and the heated battles--of the Pacific theater. During the single-player game, you'll play as a US marine caught in some of the most important battles of the campaign. Thanks to a new graphic engine, the action will feel more lifelike than ever as you pick up a rifle and engage in intense firefights against realistic Japanese opponents. But when you're wrapped up with the single-player game, you'll probably look forward to the game's multiplayer mode, which will pit you against real human opponents. EA has invested quite a bit of time and thought in the multiplayer, but we'll let senior producer Matt Powers explain some of the new features in this installment of our designer diaries.
MoH Bettah Multiplayah
By Matt Powers,Senior Producer, EA LA
So...bottom line: We're all gamers at EA LA. We all want to make a great game. With that in mind, we decided that by focusing on a few key areas, we could create an awesome multiplayer experience worthy of the Medal of Honor name.
Cohesion is an important factor in game design. Creating a cohesive game with both single-player and multiplayer components is a challenge. It's like making two games at once! Each component is equally difficult, yet they require different efforts. They can feel disconnected, and many times the quality of either the single-player or the multiplayer outshines the other component, making the overall game seem unmatched and segmented. Frequently, this can be blamed on a short development cycle--a team has been focused largely on developing a single-player game and at the end of the development cycle they port some maps for use in multiplayer and throw in some basic game modes. It's obviously not ideal, but sometimes that's the only option.
Luckily, we had enough foresight to avoid that situation with Medal of Honor Pacific Assault. To ensure that multiplayer was just as well tended as single-player, we decided to contract [Medal of Honor Allied Assault Breakthrough developer] TKO Software. We wanted them to build something that was true to the Medal of Honor franchise yet was fresh and new, and an awesome multiplayer experience to boot! EA would manage the game design with TKO owning execution. Thankfully TKO was up for the challenge!
The relationship has been very fruitful. Our best innovation has been the game design of Invader, the cornerstone of our multiplayer game. I won't go into the details of Invader here--there is plenty of information about it online--but I did want to discuss some of the less obvious design choices with Invader and how they fit into our vision for the multiplayer portion of the game.
Gamers love to run and gun. So, it goes without saying that this experience should be fun and rewarding. Invader will allow people to enjoy themselves and be successful without forcing them to learn any of the other details of the mode. Of course, the more you play, the more you learn, and the better you play. The game has legs--there are lots of strategies and rewards we will use to keep people coming back for more.
Gamers love cooperative play. Playing a game is one thing, playing competitively is another. Playing as a team whose success depends on the actions of each member is another thing altogether; it adds a whole new dimension to the game. We developed the multiplayer maps with teams in mind. You won't have to play as a team to have fun, but you may be more successful. There are places in each map that will test team play in the extreme and players will find this very rewarding.
Gamers love things that are fresh and new. That's why we designed Invader to be expandable. What you see will be just the beginning!
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- GameSpot Score8.3great
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- Release: Nov 4, 2004 »
- ESRB: Teen
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