IncGamers was lucky enough to sit down with EALA's Sean Decker and Greg Goodrich to discuss the upcoming Medal of Honor reboot. Find out why there's space for both Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Medal of Honor in the EA shooter stable and what the Tier One Operators have brought to the table. 

Sean Decker, VP and general manager of EA Los Angeles studio

IncGamers: Why did you decide take Medal of Honour out of World War II?

Sean Decker: I think it really came down to we'd told a lot of stories about World War II, and it was just time to move on. There's been a lot of good stories about soldiers that are available to tell in the current day. Looking at the medium, people play videogames today. It used to be you'd read books, and then you'd go to the movies, then eventually television, and videogames is another way to get stories across and it's the medium of the day. We thought it was worth telling those stories.

I think, again, it was trying to stay out of all the politics. There's been a lot of really good movies – the Gotham Awards just came out and Hurt Locker was the top one. It has nothing to do with the war in Iraq and why it started, or anything else – it's just about the men on the ground, what they go through on a day-to-day basis, and their emotions. That's where we wanted to stay. It's just about the men on the ground. We never talk about the politics, how this all got started, how it fits into the geo-political world – that's not the story we're trying to tell. It's not going to be a big propaganda piece where we wave the flag, or anything like that. It's literally about the people that're on the ground.

How did you get the support of the Tier One Operators?

The Medal of Honor franchise is lucky in that it started off with a good relationship with the military, and because we've stayed true to the stories and to what has actually happened, we were able to talk to them and get good co-operation from different government agencies and branches of the military. So when we came to them again and said that we wanted to tell a different story – not one that happened 50 years ago, but one that's a little more relevant to today – they were very accommodating to us, and we've kept that same respect that we've always had. It's been a good relationship, so it probably wasn't as hard as if we were a brand new game that came out, and said “Hey, we'd like to do this.” They probably would've looked at us a little differently at that point.

How different was it to move the franchise into the modern day?

I think you really have to think about it differently. Today, there's no such thing, really, as frontlines, and entire nations going to war. It's much more fluid than that and it's much more confusing, and we tried to build that in. You have a lot of different people fighting in areas from high mountaintops to the middle of cities, and it's hard for a lot of people to tell who're the friends and who're the enemies, and there are a lot of different tactics being used. I mean, the number one today is the IED. That's the biggest killer of Coalition troops today – not something you would really have thought about in a World War II game. So those are things we had to take into consideration when making the game.

How realistic will the game be?

I think that there are certain things that you have to forgive - whether it's a movie, a game, TV, a book – that the medium isn't quite good at getting it across. If you were a sniper and you were doing a realistic re-enactment of being a sniper today, you would probably spend 30 hours sitting, waiting, and watching people go by. Not necessarily something that people would want to play a game about or watch a movie about. Great for a description, though, in a book. That's something that you could easily talk about and get a real feeling of how it is to sit there, and the hours of boredom, and heat, and bugs, and “I can't move” and so on and so forth, but other mediums don't lend themselves to that. I think that's one of the things that you have to do with movies and TV and so on. I think that with games, for us, that's one of the things that we had to do in that place. There's going to be a feature that you'll learn about later on that kind of plays more towards that realism when it comes to your health and things like that, but we'll talk about that later.

As you're using the Frostbite engine, can we expect destructible buildings?

I think you'll be able to see destructible environments in multiple places, both in the multiplayer and some in the single-player as well.

How do things work with the Tier One Operators? Do you take all of their opinions immediately into account, or...?

I think it's more of a conversation. If you get a feeling that people are against doing something, then we take that into consideration and in most cases we wouldn't do that, and then in other cases they're fine with certain things. It's a relationship and in any relationship there's give and take, and in good relationships we listen to each other, so that's what we've done.

Let's talk about EA for a moment, being that you're the general manager of EALA. How have this changed for publishers in the past few years? We've seen a massive rise in digital distribution, PC retail sections are shrinking...

I think it's more adjusting to where the consumer wants to consume games, and so it's moving a bit away from packaged goods. Packaged goods are by no means dead, but at the same time, people play games on their iPhones now, and people play games on the PC but they didn't buy it in a store – they downloaded it. I think it's more about us adjusting where we deliver our games to the customer, but also at the price point the customer is looking for. So instead of looking for a full game at $60 USD, they're looking for a smaller game, but at a smaller price as well. I think those are the adjustments that you're seeing EA make, both in changes to staff, but also purchases that EA's making.

I think in the last generation – the PS2 and the Xbox – when there was a different look at videogames and a different consumer, almost, where it was more specialised, that in order to draw in more customers you really needed that movie title with the big marketing budget and so on. Today, there are so many people that just play videogames to play videogames, and love them, and know about the different franchises, that it's sometimes not as effective to have that movie title that you had before. I think also that a lot of movie games, honestly, have gotten a bad reputation when it comes to the quality, and it just seems like an add-on. At the same time, some of EA's biggest franchises in the past have been both Lord of the Rings games as well as the Harry Potter games. There is definitely a place for it but the game has to fit well, not only with the movie, but also with the audience for the movie. You want to have that person go and see the movie, and at the same time say “I want to extend my experience, and I'm a gamer, and so this is one way I can get that.” So it has to be a fit, I think, on both sides.

How do you actually go about getting these movie tie-ins, then? For Harry Potter, do you talk to the film license holder, or JK Rowling, or...?

Securing big titles is very complicated. [Laughs] A lots of people have different rights, and are you looking for the rights for a movie? Are you looking for the rights for the book? Who owns the rights? And so on and so forth. EA is aggressive at looking at different properties throughout the world at any given time, but at the same time it's extremely selective, and so are the people who are looking to give out the rights for whatever they may own as well. It's extremely complicated and there's both give and take. EA pursues some people, some people pursue EA.

Let's take a step back for a moment. You're new to EALA, correct?

I got here eight months ago, fresh from Battlefield and Battlefield 1943 and Mirror's Edge, and now we've got Medal of Honor here, and Command & Conquer, and a couple of other games we're working on.

Mirror's Edge was a rather spectacular game, and it was good to see EA take a chance on something like that...

One of the great things about EA is that EA is open to new ideas. Mirror's Edge was a brand new idea and a brand new IP and I think that, again, EA's totally open to innovation. But at the same time we're careful about what we put out. It's got to go through a lot of testing and looking at, seeing whether we can deliver a good game. There's a tonne of ideas floating around EA right now and a lot of people working on ideas and prototypes. Some of them see the light of day, some of them don't – just like in the movie industry, or the TV industry, or books, or scripts, or whatever else.

EA is releasing both Medal of Honor and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, both of which are military-focused first-person shooters set in the real world. Do you think that the games are going to be competing with each other, or do you think they're sufficiently different?

I think there's enough separation between Medal of Honor and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, both in time and in tone. Having worked on both franchises and seen and worked with both teams, they have different ideas of first-person shooters, especially in the tone and how you play, and also the pacing of the game. Medal of Honor is really more of a... I'd put it as a CNN type of feel. It's much more, again, about authenticity, and about today. Bad Company and the Battlefield franchise has never really tried to take itself too seriously, and has built itself – Bad Company especially – around a completely fictionalised world. At the same time, it tries to be hard-edge when it comes to the actual combat in the game. I think there's some good separation between the two. A lot of different companies out there have multiple shooters and can find some good space for them, and I think EA will as well.

Comments

ukimpact (1) Posted: 07:36 on 27 Feb 2010

looks like the best looking game i have seen for a long time , i hope there's going to be a decent size beta to test this game online and developer's i trust in listening to the forum users , excellent