Creative director Rich Hilleman says "execution" problems led to new shooter failing to perform up to expectation.
Electronic Arts has come out to say Medal of Honor: Warfighter failed to make a mark due to "execution" problems during its development, including not having the necessary production talent. Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun, EA chief creative director Rich Hilleman said the game's problems stemmed from EA's production of the game and not any external factors.
"We don't think it's a genre problem," he said. "It's an execution problem. We don't think Medal of Honor's performance speaks to any particular bias in that space against modern settings or World War II or any of that. It's much more that we had some things we should've done better."
"What we think right now is that, for the next couple years, we can just have one great thing in that space," he added. "So we're choosing for it to be Battlefield."
The Medal of Honor series is now on hold. And according to Hilleman, the franchise going on hiatus is preferable to the series moving forward without the necessary creative talent in place for it to succeed.
"I think a key part of this is having the right amount of high-quality production talent," Hilleman said. "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."
For more on Medal of Honor: Warfighter, check out GameSpot's review.
Eddie Makuch (Mack-ooh) is a News Editor at GameSpot. He works out of the company's Boston office in Somerville, Mass., and loves extra chunky peanut butter.
In the single player perspective, storyline is a success for me. It kept my interest just like how good MOH2010 story was, and the graphics were excessively inspiring. Specially the design of faces of human is absolutely realistic. No whining about the game from my side!
1 Like "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." ....Wait, what?
Does that mean you have titles that you're doing badly? Well, admitting it is a first step. Perhaps if you weren't a vacuous black hole that dismantles studios and leeches off? every franchise it can possibly get, you wouldn't be "blessed" this way.
5 Like Oh yes, the typical corporate explanation. Blame the developers, saying they lack talent, rather than admitting the suits higher up made the bad decision of wanting to replicate Modern Warfare verbatim. This is how contemporary corporatism works: when a project fails, always find a scapegoat.
@anigmhaWhat they should have done is laid low during this Modern Warfare fad and spent the time making a really good game that stayed true to the WWII setting of the series. Instead they clumsy jumped on the Modern Warfare bandwagon showing up too late for the party and it shows. Too bad they are shelving the series because WWII shooters are going to make a comeback now that the market is not over-saturated with them and we havnt seen one for several years.
Exactly!
This dumb heads always blame the lower ranks to explain their failure...
The game campaign is awesome...the MP is COD style, what I do not like ,
battlefield is getting on the same track...so blame yourselves...not the guy that is Dev ...
Deal EA. We'll take this admission with a grain of salt if you stop buying franchises you don't even have the resources to develop properly. "We're blessed to have more titles than we can do well today?" Blessed? It's the result of aggressive IP accumulation over the last decade and a half, and very little to do with your 'creative talent'. So a good problem, you say? Certainly for you, as you can sit on and strategically market / milk a wealth of popular franchises, but it is certainly not a 'good problem' for fans of any non-Battlefield franchise you've bought up in your quest to own everything, everywhere.
The drive to push mp over/into sp is their downfall. Forcing mp into the sp game play is putting me off. Even dead space 3 requires mp game time to influence the sp game, that is so wrong. ME3 should have taught EA that. To think that mp arenas make up for shoddy sp modes is killing the games. I love mp, well used to, but I need a reasonably good story line and subsequently a feel good single game to get me to do mp.
I might be the only one to think so, but "We don't think it's a genre problem," ... "It's an execution problem." Both are exactly the problems at heart of this company (and others). Make proper games and additional mp games. Problems solved. Happy customers, more money. Ditch the moronic marketing, which cost a lot of money that can be used to flesh out the sp as well as mp. A no brainer for me, why is it so difficult for these people?
i still love the Medal of Honor franchise no matter what. Let it rest but please, don't forget it.
I think it's just a franchise that has no place in the world anymore. EA have 1 good FPS it's Battlefield and they should concentrate their creative efforts on that not have two. Besides I do have to say it was poor Medal of Honor I have to say the visuals were really poor the graphics were so bad and rough in parts I thought I was playing a PS2 era game I couldn't believe the poor effort put into it the finished product considering they were using the Frostbite 2 engine!
2 Like I know why it failed, because it wasn't on Steam. People hate Origin and lets face it, MoH got very little publicity as well. I played the game and enjoyed it a bit, I think its the distribution that killed it.
1 Like So basically, "fuck the fans." We want to focus more on Battlefield. So.. Fuck the fans, again. And we screwed it up. Thanks.
P.S.. Fuck you
1 Like Well at least they admit they screwed it up. I love this part
"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."
Couldn't possibly be talking about a certain man who likes to throw around the word "authentic"
1 Like It failed because it was shit.
And it was shit because it was trying to be Call of Duty.
Simple.
"we should've done better" That's about the most open and honest response I've ever seen and I appreciate that they're not blaming anyone else. There are loads of examples where bad games sell well and you never hear anyone but us gamers complain then, but if a game fails commercially (despite good quality or not) you get to hear complaints from the companies as well.
2 Like I rember when I used to play BF3 and go on BF3 forums that 99% promised that they would never buy another game from EA.
Guess some of them really hadn't.
2 Like " problems during its development, including not having the necessary production talent"
BUT they still charge full price. MFs.
1 Like Singleplayer was bland, but the multiplayer was GREAT - Very fun and rewarded tactics rather than reflexes. They were really headed in the right direction with the multiplayer with a fun and unique experience compared to Battlefield.
Speaking of which, Battlefield is probably the only game left capable of competing with CoD. If you're a multiplayer FPS shooter, just release in the spring and stay away from CoD!
1 Like the game was bad and it sold bad good let it show them be it EA or activision that we want just buy any thing ,well i got it lol but did not look at a review i just was like the other one was ok will not do that again
1 Like @HiImUPSMan Enough with all the CoD comments. Everyone thinks they NEED to reference CoD in some way or another when speaking about ANY game. This game flopped simply because it sucks. CoD beats this game to death, and that's a sad fact. If this game was branded CoD, then CoD would be completely dead
9 Like EA you do well with all the titles and franchises you have, you piss and shit on them until they are just glorified cash dispensers
id say leave it in the arhives and dont touch it again ... [or bring out HD version of the PS2 ww2 games, which shit on the latest series]. And concentrate resources towards Battlefield and Crysis, which are well established in their own right. I mean MOH has failed at two attempts, time to call it a day.
1 Like If they realize they made a mistake, why not reward the buyers who trusted them and bought the unfinished project?
3 Like I understand that EA still has to make some money after backing the project, but if they knew the game wasn't going to meet their standards, why was it even released? Or why wasn't there an attempt to try and bring the game back on track? They HAD to see this coming way before it hit store shelves and gamers hands.
I mean no testers said, "Yep, total crap!"? Maybe they weren't "allowed" to talk about it like that. Who knows.
1 Like @SnakeEyesX80 It's like they're thinking "This game is bad, but I can't say anything about it until after it has failed our financial projections. Only then can I tell people what we at the company already knew". I understand that no company wants their employees to badmouth their products, because that leads to reduced sales, which might not have happened otherwise, but this hush-hush policy does have its disadvantages. "Positive thinking, let's hope for the best and maybe we can fool enough people to make it profitable" seems like their way to deal with these situations until it has officially bombed.
This article could have been summed up very quickly by simply saying, "We at EA have realized that one of the reasons Medal of Honor came ups short was, well, because we suck in general. Now that we're finally starting to realize our ways, feel free to abandon all future developments from our company."
Quite embarrassing really, a fully backed EA studio can't make a shooter better than a couple of guys in Sweden, but I think they remembered the most crucial element, fun, not tiresome shooting again and again. He could have just said "we're losers, we can't make shooters, please don't look at us" EA is suffering due to Kickstarter anyway, so the news always gets better.
"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."
Hmmm... That's about 80% of the games EA puts out. 80% of their games are cash-grabs that lack any real heart & soul and are NOT done well. But I guess their standards for a good game is very much different then what gamers consider good games.
No the whole reason it failed was because its a run of the mill fps thats been there done that. Sure it looks pretty with frostbite 2 engine but thats mearly polishing a turd.
1 Like "Warfighter"
implying the "war on terror" is even a war to begin with.
Not to sound like a libtard but it's hard to believe that after all these years they'd still make an America fuck yeah game while keeping a straight face. Releasing it to the cynical public and what you get is eyes rolling everywhere.
Also shit game in general
Ah, yea? Let's have terrorist countries operating willy-nilly then, shall we!
What about the 'war on terror' is so difficult to grasp? There is a group of people who are obsessed with destroying civilisation so that they can achieve their goal of restoring the lost caliphate (manifesto differs from group to group, but more or less the same). Seems pretty simple to me! Not to mention the threat of violence they impose has been shown to be VERY real.
I don't NOT like the game because I'm chocking in my own biases and political convictions -- unlike some, aye?
@Devils-DIVISION@raweewatTo quote Sir Michael Howard:
?To 'declare war' on terrorists, or even more illiterately, on 'terrorism' is at once to accord them a status and dignity that they seek and which they do not deserve.?
?It confers on them a kind of legitimacy. Do they qualify as 'belligerents' ? If so, should they not receive the protection of the laws of war? This was something that Irish terrorists always demanded, and was quite properly refused.?
(speech at the Royal United Services Institute, 31 October 2001)
@Devils-DIVISIONI think your position is dangerous while I'm being more cautious here.
"War on terror" is problematic because it encourages a primarily military reply (engage and destroy as you say). We need a more nuanced response than that.
Also the phrase kind of implies that there are us and them. If you truly believe in your(our) way of life then there should be only us. Those other people are just psychos and/or criminals. Now what should you do with these people then? Incarceration and/or rehabilitation are surely better than engage and destroy. Look at the last part of the quote I gave. N.Irish terrorists wanted to be declared war upon, to be treated as prisoners of war and such. If the government had done that I'd suspect things would've been a lot worse.
@raweewat
I've heard some of the most pathetic arguments used against the Afghan/Iraq war/war against terror. But if what you quoted is 'roughly' your position, it is, in your defense, a more respectable position. But I would argue it is an unrealistic and dangerous position to take.
This sort of enemy has been around for a long time. They are a politicised group that want absolute control and destruction over very specific locations, some of these locations I love and live in. They have the same political goals as any oppressive & aggressive nation. The only difference is that they are smaller and operate more broadly. I don't care much about the dignity and status of such people, as much as I didn't care about the dignity and status of the Nazis (who by the way didn't receive the 'full' protection of the law - which is no problem to me). The enemy was obvious then as it is obvious now. To not engage and destroy an enemy that threatens to return civilisation to the dark ages is to me servile, and much more, it's sadomasochistic.
I will say one thing: (for irony sakes) I agree that declaring war on terrorism doesn't makes sense, but that's because the war is already by definition active. The quote you provided is, of course, applied broadly. The most important thing here is that we know who the enemy is, 'Islamo-fascists; they happen to fall under the category of terrorist - big whoop. What we call the war, is just a case of pure semantics.
[EDIT: sorry for the wall of text everyone (I can't pass a challenge)]
It came out short cos at some point, they began to copy the Call Of Duty Franchise (Particularly Modern Warfare). Activition still has more creative teams in this aspect. For them to be able to release Modern Warfare and Black Ops Series but distinct in their environment and settings shows that they are really creative and not just aimed at creating exactly two modern warfare games. In the case of EA, the Battlefield and Medal of Honor series are so similar (in terms of the settings) and both are still similar to the already successful Modern Warfare Series. They need to re-think their setting and environments
It came up short because there is already a Call of Duty franchise. You idiots can say whatever you want to make yourself sound good, the reason for your failure is obvious even to you.
Let me explain why it came up short. Ready?
- Modern military shooters are shit.
- Medal of Honor: Warfighter is bad even for a modern military shooter.
1 Like But how will I be able to play another military shooter set in the desert?! Damn you EA, stop taking these original games off the market!
1 Like The markets flooded with too much of the same crap it's as simple as that. Be original, make something different from the other guys. The COD series is the same crap every time but at least with a twist here or there and their formula seems to still be working for some. I don't think it's gonna sustain itself much longer but that's to be expected. We need variety, not cookie cutter crap that has us simply comparing two different games with too many similarities. That's just never gonna be very successful.
This is the first time I can remember EA owning up to their own mistakes. The MoH series was good back in the day, but they're clearly too focused on stealing CoD's crowd. They need to make the franchise more unique. Change the time period or something.
1 Like @thereal-15-cent It's not EA owning up, it's just one guy saying it. I may believe it could maybe be EA if they stop pumping out the same Madden etc. every year yet charging a full game price for it. It always amazes me how people keep buying the next year version of the same type of game over and over with lil difference from what I see when I rent it for a day to check it out. They're raping the market with some of this crap.
@charlieholmes True. As a football fan, I really hope 2K gets exclusive rights to NFL games soon. As for Madden, I think it's best to only buy it once every 3-6 years. They make minimal improvements from year to year, but they make big improvements every few years. I'm still playing Madden 09, and I'm thinking about finally getting a new Madden this year. But yeah, I can't imagine buying it every year.
Medal of Honor: Warfighter doesn't merge its cliched parts into a satisfying whole, making it just another middle-of-the-road military shooter.
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