Medal of Honor: The Game That Defined The Modern FPS

You’re huddled in a Higgins boat with seven other men. To your left and right, other boats carrying many more quivering soldiers cut through the tumultuous ocean. Behind you, over snarling engines and the roar of the sea, there is a shout:

“Clear the ramp. Thirty Seconds!”

A few moments later, artillery whistles overhead. Two shells splash harmlessly into the water, kicking spray into the air. The third strikes the boat next to you, and this time its fire and bodies that are blasted upward. Then the beach looms, the boat stops, a whistle blows, and the ramp lowers.

So begins the most influential half-hour of any shooter in the last decade.

“ So begins the most influential half-hour of any shooter in the last decade.

Strange, then, that the tenth anniversary of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault went almost completely unnoticed in January this year. Perhaps the lack of attention is due to another game you might have heard of – the one with an acronym that is also a kind of fish, quite popular in Britain battered and served with chips.

Yet the lead developers of that game were formerly members of 2015 Inc; the creators of Allied Assault. The intricately scripted sequences and distinct whiff of Spielberg inspired them to go on and found Infinity Ward. Allied Assault was one of the first games that could accurately be termed cinematic, and set the modern template for that most prevalent gaming trope of shooting bad people until they fall over.

So maybe Allied Assault deserves a little bit of our time to belatedly mark its tenth birthday. Sound good? Then grab your Thompson and let’s check out this house. Some boys from the 101st might be trapped inside.

In his review for IGN, Steve Butts described Medal of Honor as “like a really fantastic movie.” Nowadays that might be considered an insult, given the mixed opinions of games that attempt to imitate cinema. Back in 2002, however, creating an entire game with the same production values of a Hollywood film was a fairly radical idea. Cinema’s prior influence on games had been restricted to cut-scenes, FMV and the “interactive movies” of the Nineties, which were about as emotionally compelling as a rice-cake.

The objective was to make a game that played like a film, and the Medal of Honor franchise already had a strong movie heritage, having been created by Spielberg himself. Allied Assault took full advantage of that legacy, often recreating scenes from Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers ad verbatim. An enormous amount of those production values went into one particular sequence. It was the astonishing, exhilarating and harrowing Omaha beach landing that stood out ten years ago, but does it still stand up after a decade’s worth of bigger battles and prettier explosions?

Absolutely. The experience is largely held together by some incredible sound engineering: the screaming artillery, the cries of fallen squadmates, the bullets snapping past your ears and thumping into sand and water and bodies. This carefully orchestrated cacophony makes the couple of dozen men struggling up the beach alongside you feel like a couple of hundred. Some sturdy animation and watertight scripting also help to combat the game’s ageing visuals.

The care and craft that went into what is a very small part of a substantial game means Allied Assault’s beach landing holds its own against even the most spectacular sequences of today’s shooters. Unfortunately, the gap between the Overlord mission and the other levels – perceptible even upon release – has widened over time. A large portion of the game consists of robust but unremarkable corridor combat. The Norway levels in particular feel barren and dull.

That said, there are still some stand-out moments away from the Norman coastline. The opening level remains a stormer. A Trojan-Horse mission gone awry, it’s short, sharp and punchy, a perfect start. At other end of the game, fighting the in the forests along the Siegfried line is fittingly haunting. The war is a spectre of its former self, and the scattered and battered Wehrmacht ambush you from behind trees and loom suddenly out of the night mist.

Interestingly, one of my favourite parts of the game has become one of the most reviled – weeding out nests of snipers from an obliterated French town. It’s a sudden change of pace from the run-and-gun nature of the earlier missions, scrambling over rain-slicked rubble, hugging the few remaining walls to avoid the optics of deadly German marksmen. Brutal and unforgiving, the “Sniper Town” levels caused a lot of frustration among gamers, but they were also arguably truest to the conflict, bluntly portraying the desolation and desperation during its latter stages, the last breaths of the war before that ghostly final mission kicks in.

“ It’s quite striking how little military shooters have evolved since Allied Assault’s release.

It’s quite striking how little military shooters have evolved since Allied Assault’s release. The charred remnants of the Third Reich may have been left for more modern and ethically dubious battlegrounds, but we fight our contemporary conflicts in much the same way. There are some mechanical differences; health-packs are a constant, and there’s no limitation on the number of weapons you can carry, but it’s the overarching tone and style which has influenced shooters from Crysis to Homefront. Even non-FPS games like Dead Space and Uncharted owe a lot of their success to Allied Assault on a proof-of-concept basis.

Perhaps the most telling difference between Allied Assault and the modern FPS is that, even when duplicating films scene-for-scene, Allied Assault never wrenches control away from the player. It’s a competent shooter with some outstanding scripted moments, rather than being outstandingly scripted with competent shooting moments. That gradual shift in focus undoubtedly stemmed from the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Allied Assault’s beach landing, yet for all its filmic trappings, Allied Assault never forgot its status a game.

Crucially, Allied Assault wasn’t an homage to Hollywood. It was a direct challenge, a statement that games can be as grandiose and evocative as cinema. Parts of the game suffered for it, but the point was definitely proved. Ten years on, the FPS genre still cannot escape the need to prove that point, to create bigger and more bombastic scripted sequences. The question now is; how much longer must it continue before it is finally satisfied?

There have been better shooters, smarter shooters, more innovative and more interesting shooters, but the extent of Allied Assault’s influence – for better or worse – is second only to Doom.



Source : ign[dot]com