'Medal of Honor' Devs Avoid EA's Anti-Call of Duty Campaign

Game Rant

By Rob Keyes

Published Mar 16, 2012

While Electronic Arts and Activision may battle it out in marketing their first-person shooters, 'Medal of Honor: Warfighter' developer Danger Close Games wants no part of it.

Whether they want it or not, Electronics Arts developers DICE and Danger Close Games are in a war against Activision's Infinity Ward, Treyarch and Sledgehammer Games. Activision's Call of Duty titles are the ones to beat every fall, and while no one has come quite close to the year-after-year world record breaking sales numbers of each CoD installment, EA is trying hard to compete.

And by compete, we don't just mean in terms of sales numbers. Both the heads of Activision and EA had a war with words last year between Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and for this year's battle, Danger Close Games doesn't want to be a part of it.

It started when the first WWII-themed Call of Duty games put an end to the classic Medal of Honor series, to which EA responded years later by attempting to "attack" (their own words) with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and the modernized reboot of Medal of Honor in 2010. After hyping up MoH only to follow up by saying it didn't even meet their own expectations, that plan wasn't working and it didn't mix well a year later when trying to promote Battlefield 3.

So, with Medal of Honor: Warfighter, fans should know to wait and see for themselves. Will EA pick a fight with Treyarch's Call of Duty (Black Ops 2?) coming this fall? If they do, it'll be the executives talking smack and not the people actually involved with making the game.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter Producer Greg Goodrich spoke with GamesMaster and touched upon the perceived battle with Call of Duty and EA's tendency to attack during their marketing.

"I think that because of our genre and the history of our franchise... it's just a natural thing to want to go out and pick a fight... [But] if you look at it, almost none of it came from the development team. EA is a very big organisation, and there are a lot of grown-ups and adults that manage things that are out of our control."

Goodrich followed up that it would be "disrespectful" to use Warfighter's reality-based story of Tier 1 operators as a selling about against other video games, because in real life, it's not fun to do what these people have to do.

In the end, comparisons will always be made because that's the nature of the business and for consumers, the competition is welcomed and needed so each franchise and their respective developers constantly strive for innovation and improvements.

Follow me on Twitter @rob_keyes.

Source: GamesMaster (via CVG)