Interview: Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault
The latest Medal of Honor game recently hit store shelves. We had a chance to sit down with EA LA Vice President and Executive Producer Rick Giolito and Senior Producer Brady Bell to discuss the latest in the zillion-selling World War II first-person shooter franchise.
Gamestar: What can MOH veterans expect from this latest installment?
Rick Giolito: MOH: Pacific Assault kind of represents taking Medal of Honor to the next level in almost every category, including story, immersion and technology. What we as a company decided to do was really make a commitment to PC first person shooter technology, so what we decided to do was create our own engine called Havok that includes physics, realtime AI, and use of all the latest technology in terms of shaders and working hand in hand with Intel and Nvidia.
GS: So the game has really been rebuilt from the ground up?
RG: That's correct. The story takes place from 1941 to the end of 1943. You play as private Tommy Conlin. You volunteer before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and you go into boot camp. Boot camp is actually a boot camp much like Full Metal Jacket. You go in and actually go through the whole thing. It's not actually a training level, but it's a training level with bite, with story. You meet your character, the other characters in the game, learn about them, where they're from, and based on how you do, you get a nickname. And then after that, you get sent out to Pearl Harbor for deployment, you're told you're going to get on the (battleship) Arizona. On your way, the attack happens, and that changes everything.
After the attack you hop and skip across the Pacific in an attempt to stop the Japanese onslaught, and turn the tide of the war.
Some of the things we really wanted to do with this game...This is much different than fighting war in Europe. The war in Europe was a war between cultures that were pretty much similar, but ideologically different obviously. The "rules of war" were the same, you understood when a guy put up a white flag it's a surrender. But war against Japan was a completely different experience for us, we had no idea who these people were and we started a huge propaganda campaign against the Japanese. We really thought that we were going to go in, take care of business, and wipe 'em out, no problem. Because, who are these people? What really happened though is that we when started fighting them, we discovered that this is really the clash of two cultures: the American culture where everyone was fighting because of the camaraderie. It was a brotherhood, you know Band of Brothers. That's what the American soldier was all about, let's get this over with and get back home. The Japanese had a code of bushido. They were brought up from when they were kids that everything was for the love of the country, and love of the emperor. They were taught that is was better to die honorably than to be taken prisoner. You don't want to shame the name of your family. So when we got in there, all of a sudden, there's this culture of Americans who want to get this thing over with and go home, and the Japanese who turned out to be this relentless fighting force that would not stop...and that's what we tried to capture in the game. We really wanted to capture that dichotomy.
We really spent a lot of time in redefining the AI completely. This is a squad based shooter unlike other Medal of Honor games. You work along with your squad of guys as you go through Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, and finally Tarawa. And we give you the opportunity to influence and control, if you will your squad as you fight.
The Japanese AI is a very aggressive AI, and part of what we wanted to do is give the player the opportunity to play in different ways since it's procedural rather than scripted AI. And that's not to say that we don't have scripted events in the game. That's kind of a hallmark of MOH, the setups, and the big scripted events. But since the AI is no longer scripted it plays differently every time, and it plays differently on how you approach it.
Brady Bell: Each mission is still set up in the traditional MOH way, giving you archival movie to give you some emotional setup going into it before you go into actual battle.
The question is, what's going to happen. Is your medic going to come over and save you? Or are you going to die? Once you go down, it's no longer: you're shot, you go down, you respawn. In an effort to make it more of a challenge, more authentic, what we've done is give the player on different levels of difficulty a certain amount of "health units" you can use to call the medic over to get through the level, so you've got to manage that as well.
The really interesting dynamic that that introduces is that you now have more of an interest in your squad. You've got to protect this guy so he can patch you up. So calling for him for help is very dangerous. You've got to give him cover fire so that he can get to you. It's in your best interest to keep him alive.
RG: You can't stop in the middle of a battlefield with bullets whizzing, because if he gets hit, he goes down. Once you go down, we call that VOD, or verge of death, a couple of things can happen. One, a Japanese solder finds you first and takes you out. Two, the medic comes over, he finds you, and he heals you. Or he can come over, and while he's busy trying to heal you a Japanese soldier can whack him, and then whack you. Or, a Japanese soldier can be about to stick you, and one of your guys takes him out. This is what players need to get into: managing your medic and how he heals you, because if you "tap out" too early, you're going to be using up his limited healing. Of course, we have quick saves too, so you can manage it that way.
GS: Is the medic the only person in you squad that has a special ability? Is everyone else just an infantryman?
BB: It's a basic fire team like the Marines have. So, within a squad, there would be a fireteam which is basically composed of five guys, which works brilliantly for videogames. You have your heavy weapons guy, your light weapons guy, and a sniper, as well as your corpsman, who is a medic in the Marines, and he's got his pistol and he heals everybody. It's got a nice balance to it as far as gameplay.
RG: Part of your job, since you can direct a squad in battle is not to lose everybody. You can lose guys, so you want to manage them smartly. Most first person shooters are pretty much a run and gun style where the squad mates are fodder. In this game you can actually use them and send them forward, or tell them to come back, or you can take point. Sometimes you're asked to take point.
GS: If squad members die, they're replaced with a rookie for fresh meat?
RG: Some do, some don't.
BB: The main characters of your fireteam are going to make it through, except for special sections of the game where we set up you saving them or not. The difference is, they'll be knocked down and incapacitated, so they're not with you for the rest of that level. They're writhing in pain, and maybe the medic is going to go off and heal them, and now you're down two guys.
BB: You're lying there on your back, and you're hoping your medic is going to come over and heal you, and you're hoping he's not going to get shot, or a Japanese soldier is going to stab you with his bayonet or stomp on your head as you lie there. The point of that is, it creates a new situation where if I die in the game I'm no longer going, "OK, c'mon let's go, let's go." Trying to restart. I now actually root for my guys. So your squad becomes all the more real. You're saying, "Gosh, Jimmy come and save me!" And when he doesn't some other guy comes over and kills me in a really "satisfying" way. Hey, it's not so bad to die. That's the whole point is to make everyone around you a bit more real.
GS: What kind of hardware requirements are you guys looking at for the game?
RG: It's a 1.5 256 MB and GeForce3 is our minimum spec, which is what you'll find in Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. This is a big jump for everyone. To be able to do the kind of work we're doing now is kind of a hint of what you're going to see in the transition to Xbox 2 and PlayStation 3.
GS: So what's in the special DVD Director's Edition?
BB: There's a cool heavy machine gun that you only get in the Director's Edition. There's a contest to get your voice in the next MOH game. Outside of that, we've also produced a bunch of original movies. There's also a pop-up facts feature. It's just like pop-up video (on VH1). Little pop up balloons give you historical info as you play through. We have developer facts, things from the team, things specific to a certain level, facts about the weapon you're holding, There's also a category that's really important to me called liberties taken, where we intentionally go away from what historically happened because it's better for gameplay. So now you can go through the game and get roughly over a thousand of these things where you can learn about the project, history, what happened. It's my subtle foot in the door to say. I'd like to teach you something while we're entertaining you because World War II is just that damn important.
