Medal Of Honor: Warfighter

Announced by OXM two weeks ago, Electronic Arts introduced the latest Medal of Honor to the rest of the game industry at a special event during the Game Developer's Conference tonight.

When conceptualizing the sequel to the 2010 reboot of the popular Medal of Honor series, executive producer Greg Goodrich stumbled on a secret weapon. Why dream up imaginary military campaign when you can consult directly with Tier 1 operators who lived through it? When two former special forces soldiers offered a manuscript of their "vent book" -- a collection of musings about their fellow soldiers, the missions they participated in across the globe, and the strategies they would employ to fight terrorism if they could remove all the bureaucracy hindering their work -- Goodrich jumped at the chance to use it as the basis for Warfighter.

The vent book served as a starting point for the game. From there, Danger Close extracted intelligence from their missions and synthesized the events into the lives of Preacher, Mother, and Voodoo -- the characters introduced in the last game. The result is a game that puts its fictitious characters into recreations of real-world events pulled right out of the headlines, like the confrontation with Somali pirates and hostage recovery missions in the Philippines.

In the demo that we saw, the trio teams up with an elite Philippine military unit to free some civilians the extremist Islamic group Abu Sayyaf took hostage when storming the capital building in Isabela City, one of the poorest cities in the country. Making matters worse, they must perform the mission in the middle of a typhoon. As the group approaches the building, it's clear the storm has taken its toll. The outside windows are shattered and water is pouring into the building, flooding the lower floors in the process.

After breaching through the front door, the team systematically neutralizes threats while moving into the upper levels. When the bullets are flying, the power of the Frostbite 2 engine is in full effect. Facades aren't being ripped down due to explosions like in Battlefield, but the stray bullets chew up the interior of the building and grenade explosions send chandeliers spinning out of control. Danger Close says players can expect to see a lot of this style of micro destruction throughout the game.

Once the team hits a choke point, the player flanks the enemies by going through another set of rooms and inevitably takes out the unassuming baddies. When the Tier 1 team approaches the final door, an option to breach it appears and the sterotypical slow motion clearance of all the enemies on the other side of the door ensues.

With the hostages secured, the team begins the extraction sequence, which involves hopping on board a boat and manning the turret while the driver speeds through the flooded streets and falling trees. All the while, the player takes out enemies positioned on rooftops and billboards -- your standard first-person shooter fare. Once the city is cleared, they attach the boats to chinooks and fly into the sunset.

Rather than handing off the multiplayer to DICE like it did last time, Danger Close is handling the duties this time around. As Goodrich pointed out during his presentation, most kids who grow up in Poland don't dream of being U.S. Navy SEALs, so in an effort to internationalize the brand EA is taking a page out of the Rainbow Six playbook and integrating 11 other Tier 1 units like the British SAS, Australian SASR, and Polish GROM into the experience. For the multiplayer, rather than having one team take the roll of real-world rivals like the Taliban (a circumstance that got Medal of Honor into a lot of trouble last time), Warfighter pits the best spec ops groups in the world against one another in fictitious "blue vs. blue" battles. Goodrich cited the FIFA series as an example of a competitive online game that gives players a sense of national pride, and Danger Close wants to bring a similar feeling to Medal of Honor.

We couldn't extract any more information out of Danger Close regarding the multiplayer, but since Medal of Honor: Warfighter is scheduled to ship on October 23 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, we expect to hear more about it soon. If you want a glimpse of the game, check out the debut trailer.