Medal of Honor - On this day

Eleven years ago, the Call of Duty series ignited and glowed in the video game market. Electronic Arts did not have an answer to the Activision franchise until Battlefield 3, but they tried to retaliate with similar tactics. Namely, Call of Duty then left the Second World War behind and switched to modern conflicts, so Electronic Arts came up with the idea that they could also transfer their WW2 series Medal of Honor to current battlefields.

The 2010 Medal of Honor was conceived as a reboot of the series and took players to Afghanistan in 2002. In a very short single-player campaign, we played as a member of the American Tier 1 unit, but the perspective changed several times by the end of the game - just like in the Call of Duty games.

Multiplayer was based on class clashes between the two sides. It could be played as the Coalition (with American and British weapons) and as the Opposing Force representing the Taliban side. Originally, there was a plan to call the “opposite side” the Taliban, but public pressure was too great and Electronic Arts decided it was not worth risking a boycott of the sale. The name "Taliban" was thus removed from multiplayer but remained in single-player.

It is also interesting that the multiplayer segment of the game was done by the DICE team (creators of Battlefield) and that this part of the game was used by a completely different engine. While the single-player campaign was done in a modified Unreal Engine 3, the multiplayer was based on Frostbite.

The game was solid in the end, but nothing more than that. Despite a rich marketing campaign, players were more receptive to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 which came out half a year earlier. However, in the end, more than five million copies of the Medal of Honor were sold and the game received a sequel to Warfighter, after which the series was buried. Admittedly, Electronic Arts took him back to World War II in 2020 as a VR game worked on by the creators of Titanfall and Apex Legends.