By Jason Apuzzo. Did you folks see the debut of the new Medal of Honor trailer last night during Monday Night Football? I’ve embedded it above. This new game from EA takes place in Afghanistan, following Special Ops forces. The trailer is quite cinematic in flavor, and almost appears to be a re-telling of recent offensives in Afghanistan. You can read more about the game at the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog today. The game was designed in collaboration with some of our special ops guys.
One extremely unfortunate note, though: there’s apparently an option in this game to ‘play’ on the Taliban side, as it were – which is really tasteless.
Posted on October 12, 2010 at 10:59am.
The developers said they spent an unbelievable amount of time with spec ops guys to get this game to be as close to reality as possible, to due them the honor of portraying their daily life as accurately as possible. And imagine, Hollywood would just use that time and effort to call them killers and rapists and occupying forces.
As for the Taliban option, in all multi-player sections of previous MoH games, you could play as Allied forces or Nazis, so they just carried on the tradition, apparently unaware of the insensitivity to troops still serving. To try to remedy the situation, they have scrubbed the reference of Taliban from the multi-player section, but the US Military has still banned the game from being sold on shelves on bases and such. I kind of disagree with that heavy handed approach, but the idea itself definitely is tasteless, despite their apparent lack of intention to be malicious. In essence, it’s the “too soon” rule, although in this case, it’s not even too soon after the event, it’s still happening right now.
There have been members of the military who have come out and argued that the game isn’t a threat to turn anyone into a Taliban fighter and pit them against the military, but that’s not really the point, I don’t think. I don’t agree with banning the game, free speech and all, but I’m not going to ignore its lack of tact. I felt the same way about the airport terrorism scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which had you following terrorists as an undercover operative while they were shooting as many innocent civilians as possible. Just not something I’m wanting to revel in.
I agree – I wouldn’t want to see this sort of thing banned, but they really should’ve canned that particular player option. The thing looks like a home run, otherwise.
Oops, meant to say “to do them the honor..” not “to due them the honor…” I was thinking “give the troops their due” and typed due instead of do.