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Friday, July 9, 2010

Some thoughts on the Medal of Honor PC beta

I played the Medal of Honor beta on the PC for a few days and I have some impressions and thoughts on it. For those who don't know the new Medal of Honor is the Modern era reboot of the franchise kind of a Medal of Honor: Modern Warfare if you will. I think EA is smart to move the series into a new setting because as fun as it is to shoot Nazis in WW2 games the overall setting is getting a little stale. I think the WW2 genre of shooter was done perfectly by Treyarch with Call of Duty: World at War, so now it's time to move on.

The MOH multiplayer is being developed by DICE, makers of the Battlefield series and it feels like a mix between Battlefield Bad Company and the Modern Warfare games. I haven't been a big fan of DICE's output sense BF 1942 but for some reason I keep giving them a shot. I wanted to try out the MOH beta because I was looking for a MW type game without having to suffer playing the awful Modern Warfare 2 but this game is not what I was looking for.

The first thing I noticed that was just bad was the god awful lag. The matches were impossible to get into and when I did at times it was the typical lag fest slide show DICE games are for the first week or so. I stuck with it though and I can say before I gave up on the beta the lag was much improved but the game was still unplayable and that's because of the hit detection.

The hit detection is broken, there isn't any other way to put it. I had a number of times when I would point blank shoot someone in the face and the hit wouldn't register. I've seen videos online that show the janky hit detection at it's broken best. Do a search on youtube and you'll see what I'm talking about. But overall the guns just don't feel right, they're not any fun to shoot. This game has zero recoil, I mean none. I've read things saying "Well Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have any recoil!" but in MW2 you could hit people. If a military shooter is going to have that "fakeness" to it and reduce the recoil and have the regenerating health then you're guns should work like they don't have the recoil. My experience was that this game follows the Halo way of taking and dealing damage. You take one or two bullets to die but you can unload a clip into your enemy with hits being shown and not kill them. Some of this I think is to blame on the hit detection but when the little hit cross is popping up and they don't go down from registered head shots all I can think of is Halo.

Lastly the unlocks, they're handled like the Battlefield games. You pick a class and as you play that class you unlock things just for that class. One thing I loved about COD4 was the ability to unlock all the stuff playing as one class and then if you wanted to try another type of play out you could use the better guns to test things out. Because really these games with unlocks are not balanced because new players can't access the better equipment and the grind to get the good stuff can be terrible as you get schooled. The unlocks in this game are the standard fare, red dot sights, silencers better ammo and all that jazz. In this game though you can equip your gun with one thing from each category. I was rolling with an M-16 with a red dot, silencer and hollow point rounds and really I didn't feel anymore powerful then when I started playing. It still took the the whole magazine to kill someone.

Overall this game could of been fun but it's just at it's core broken. People will scream, "It's a beta!" but it's the worst beta I have ever played. A Multiplayer beta is suppose to be about balance and seeing if the servers can handle the load but I think this beta fails in both. Maybe EA is stretching DICE further then they can handle and this is a company that's can't do a ton at once failing on a game? I don't know. I would like to try the single player out seeing as it's being made by a different team on a different engine and see if it plays any better. If they put a demo out I'll try it but I'm not buying this blind. The PC version is 60 bucks! What the hell is that? Just because those assholes at Activision charged 60 for MW2 on PC doesn't mean all modern shooters need too!

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