Medal of Honor Beta

If you’re a gamer and you haven’t been living under a rock you’d know the new Medal of Honor is coming out October 12th 2010.  Something more right now is the fact the multiplayer beta has started and yours truly has the beta.  I suppose a large majority of people have the beta as I believe you just need Battlefield Bad Company 2 as well as a pre-order of Medal of Honor.  So I’m not really that special but I figured I’d talk about the game since I know what I’m talking about.

First things first I’ll just talk about what the game is about.  You’re suppose to be a tier one operator during the 2001 war in Afghanistan.  Although the tier one aspect really is not there in the multiplayer it just looks like you’re a normal coalition forces solider.  It doesn’t really matter though it wouldn’t play a part of the multiplayer aspect anyways.

The multiplayer you’re either part of the coalition forces or an insurgent  Right now the muliplayer contains team assault and combat mission.  Team assault is just team deathmatch like you’d see in any other first person shooter.  You spawn in a few random points on one side of the map and you attempt to kill the other team.  The team with the most points or hits the point limit wins.

Combat mission is the one I’m enjoying a bit more as it’s more along the lines of battle field bad company 2 but the objectives are much more defined.  In BF:BC2 you’d just be blowing up the mcom’s via rocket fire or whatever or basically planting a bomb on them.  There were no changes between stages it always came down to that.  In Medal of Honor’s combat mission you are actually doing objectives that seem reasonable.  So there is a barrier in the way you need to blow it up by planting a bomb.  Another case you need to secure a position where heavy machine guns were located.  Or finally you were planting bombs to destroy anti aircraft guns.  In each case there is an accompanying audio briefing to help immerse you in the situation.

One thing that is great is they did not drop dedicated servers like call of duty modern warfare 2 did.  So I’m once again enjoying the fact I’m not disconnecting finding a new host constantly or dealing with small player amounts.  That is the big thing that annoyed me about that game along with all the other unbalanced aspects that kept cropping up.

Now onto the game itself.  So we load the game itself and the first thing I’d say is the user interface feels a little strange to me.  I’m not sure why see for yourself:

The first strange aspect is the select is on every thing even though click suffices.  So it’s just very strange but it may have to do with the fact it’s a beta.  There are other pages though I did not take pictures of where there is a save button but I don’t think you actually need to use it.  It gives me the option of save or back but if I click back it saves anyways.  In some cases save is not even an option but it’s always there.  Though this could all be from being a beta so I’ll let that slide.

The game modes give you quick briefings about what is going on.  So the one combat mission level you get this screen before joining:

So just trying to get you into the game a bit.  Make it a tad bit more realistic and not just you’re going somewhere for no particular reason and you should do it no questions asked and complete this mission.  So in this case you’re helping clear the way to go after high value targets.  This area contains anti air guns which need taken out so the coalition forces can have air superiority.

So for the game itself you have the choice of three classes; Rifleman, Special Ops and Sniper.  Rifleman as you’d expect has a rifle of some kind with a grenade launcher attachment.  The Special Ops has a rifle as it’s first weapon along with a rocket launcher which is used to take out tanks as well as infantry.  The sniper obviously gets the sniper rifles as well as C4.  Although a nice touch on the sniper when you’re an insurgent it’s not called C4 but instead an improvised explosive device which you throw then you detonate with a cell phone.  Here’s pictures of the selection screens for both sides:

Coalition Forces

Insurgents:

Now each class you have unlockable and modifiable weapons similar to what you see in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 or Battlefield Bad Company 2.  So you play as a class and as you gain more points you unlock levels which give you access to new weapons or items for them.  So for example I have red sights on my guns and extra ammo.

For the general feel of the game itself there are some things I’ve picked up on.  The first one being there does not seem to be any recoil on the rifles.  Whether it’s an ak47 or m16 as far as I can tell there is no recoil.  The same can be said about the special ops weapons as well.  If you unlock a machine gun though there appears to be a bit of recoil on them for whatever reason.  I’m not sure if this is intended or not it’s really tough to say.  For the guns themselves I really cannot tell the difference between the Rifleman and Special Ops weapons.  I figured you’d suffer with issues with range with the Special Ops but as far as I can tell you really do not.  Their damage may be slightly different it’s tough to tell but not really that noticable.  This could be due to the fact you die very quickly so it only takes a few hits and you’re dead.  The sniper rifles from my limited play since I’m unlocked the bolt action sniper rifles I just don’t see the point.  They are only 1 shot one kill if it’s a head shot.  It’s just as easy to use another one and hit a person enough times to get the kill and not deal with reload times.  This might be due to the map played I’m not sure but for me I’d question the point of using the bolt action sniper rifles.  If it was in fact one shot one kill on the chest as well as the head it might be more useful to me.  The grenades in the game do not seem to do a heck of a lot of damage for whatever reason.  I’d expect a grenade reasonably close to someone to kill them but that is not the case at all.  The same can be said about the grenade launcher on the riflemen it’s basically a useless add-on.  The rocket launcher however on Special Ops does seem to do a bit more damage but it’s tough to say if it’s really that much more.  I just have not had a chance to hit enough infantry with it yet to really give a definitive answer.  This is a beta though so balancing some of these aspects may still be coming down the pipeline.

There is a tank on the combat mission map which I really don’t think adds much to the game.  It is mostly used as cover then when it gets blown up still stays there as a form of cover.  The weapons on it especially the machine gun just do not do much damage at all when you think it would.  It also for me anyways feels very strange controlling it in comparison to battlefield bad company 2.  This I’m sure will get some refinement before the final release though.

The game adds onto the audio aspect similar to that of Battlefield Bad Company 2 where a sniper just misses you your guy yells out sniper.  The same idea here as well as having added many other automatic audio aspects to add to the atmosphere and gives you that extra element of situational awareness.  It also helps with the team aspect as a lot of the time in random servers people are not talking.  So the game itself yelling out some aspects helps with this problem.

The netcode right now I’d say needs a bit of work.  I’m not sure if it was just me but I got shot from behind walls pretty frequently.  For any game this happens due to the interpolation going on and the person on the other end shooting you on their screen before you’re behind the wall.  For me though I noticed it was happening a lot more and seemed more dramatic then I would expect.  This could be an aspect they’re still trying to fix up though with the type of guns being used.  So it may be a little more refined by the time of the full release.

There is some attention to detail aspects of the game I thought were very cool.  The first being the improvised explosive device used by the insurgents.  It’s actually just the counter to coalition forces C4 explosives.  I just thought it was cool that I throw down this bomb and then rather than your typical remote detonator you get a cell phone as the remote.  The other neat aspect is when using the mortar perk if you point it to close you get a danger close warning.  I thought that as very cool I hadn’t seen any game talk about anything like that before.  They could improve on it even more when a target is selected and you have team mates close to the target zone your person says danger close.  Here’s a quick screenshot I took of the danger close:

Now you cannot see it but the orange there actually flashes danger close.  I just took a screenshot at the wrong point in time.

For other aspects unlike battle field bad company 2 the majority of the maps are not destructible.  There is the odd crate here or there and I believe some walls that go away but nothing major.  What you see is what you get basically no blowing up a wall to get at someone.  I hope though that maybe there are maps where that is the case.  I would think it make more sense that they use the terrain to create aspects that are non destructible.  Then other area’s where obviously the walls are weak they can be blown up to add a new element to the game.

My opinion right now of the game is obviously a beta has many aspects that need improvement.  It definitely has promise though and I’m looking forward to it coming out in October.  I’m sure it’ll have a much more lasting effect on me when there is more than one map to play.

Now onto the bugs I’ve found on the beta thus far for those who are curious:

• Every time I load the game up my sensitivity resets.  I join the game and my sensitivity is set as the default in game even though in my options it says otherwise.  In order to fix that I have to move it then move it back in order to actually have my correct sensitivity.
• The key to switch to the pistol does not actually work.  Instead my button for switching to the rifle switches to my pistol.  If I press it again when I am on my pistol it switches to my rifle.  It’s very strange
• I’ve become caught in several windows in maps in some sort of limbo mode.  I jump through and I then I run a bit forward and cannot move anymore.  I’m not sure where I am on the other persons screen exactly.  I might be stuck in the window or maybe I am in and they see me sort of glide running.
• There are various clipping on parts of some of the maps.  You go a certain way and you can see through the walls.