Rebooting games, modern shooters and Medal of Honour

Firstly, yes Honour is spelled with a damn U in it.

So I just watched the new trailer to the new MoH game which you can lovingly watch here:

http://kotaku.com/5531930/new-medal-of-honor-trailer-aims-for-the-heart

I admire that they're trying to add a more personal element to the game. What I don't admire is that another shooter is getting a reboot.

What in the FUCK is going on in the games industry? Firstly, just calling it "Medal of Honour" pisses me off. The first one is only 11 fucking years old, is this REALLY necessary? Do we really need to name games so they pander to the 12 year old console children who shouldn't even be playing this game in the first place? Starcraft is older than the first Medal of Honour and it's new game is properly called "Starcraft 2". Imagine if Blizzard released "Starcraft 2" and just called it "Starcraft", this is the exact damn thing they're doing.

Why I hate this is because it's so POINTLESS to do. It makes it a pain in the balls to talk about with people because now when I talk about it they go "what one are you talking about, the new one or the old one?" And saying "Medal of Honour 2010" sounds like it's a God damn sports game. And in reality, if the games industry grew some balls you could just call it what it is "Medal of Honour: We Want to Cash In on the Success of Modern Warfare 2" we'd all be in a better place.

Now, a lot of people claim that Battlefield was going all "modern warfare 2" with Bad Company 2. I think this is kind of bullshit as really the ONLY thing similar is that they both have a single player campaign with a terrible story and boring characters. In fact, Battlefield 2 which was modern combat came out in 2005, 3 years before Call of Duty 4. Thus it's more or less just factually incorrect to claim DICE copied MW2, because they fucking did it first. Plus the multiplayer in these two games are night and day different (myself preferring battlefield's).

However, Medal of Honour, as far as I know, has always been a World War 2 game and is so obviously going after the new Modern Warfare craze that seems to be sweeping the industry. As I'm writing I'm trying to hold back my rage to form a coherent article here (unlike my last one, this was written not at around 7:50pm instead of 5am). So lets try to examine the good and the bad.

Good Stuff

• The first few Medal of Honour games were really good, maybe this one will be as well.
• We have enough fucking World War 2 FPS games. Really, I could go for about 2 or 3 years without seeing one and that would be just fine with me.
• It looks like they may make a story that actually makes sense.

Bad Stuff

• The modern setting shooter seems to be the new WW2 shooter. We fucking have enough of them do something new.
• The fucking box:

Lets talk about the two bad points. First I'm going to start with the box.

Remember what I said in my last post about modern shooters being written for idiots? Who the fuck is this douche on the box? Are companies so desparate to get into the jager pounding frat boy houses they need to put a backwards baseball cap wearing, bearded fuck head right on the damn box? Are they hoping these morons will just wander in the store and go "Look brah that guy like has a hat and a gun! WHOAAAA I NEED THIS!"

This isn't the only reason I'm pissed at the box. The beard is the other. The fucking beard. Why do I hate beards? I don't, the better question is why does the military hate beards; because they do. The Canadian, British and American military DO NOT ALLOW BEARDS ON THEIR SERVICEMEN. So who the fuck IS this guy? I mean some stubble is alright, in a combat zone you can't be expected to shave every day. However, this guy has clearly been growing his beard for months. If an officer saw him he would be forced to shave or be dishonourably discharged. That's what they could call this game Medal of Dishonourable Dischargement.

Well, enough about the box; lets address the other "bad" point I made. There are too many modern shooters. Now admittedly there are like what? BF2 and it's gazillion expansions, COD4, COD6, Bad Company 1 and Bad Company 2, and medal of honour 2010 when it comes out. This isn't too many considering there are probably more WW2 FPS games in the Medal of Honour series alone. What really irks me though is that there's clearly some money grubbing fucker running the show.

"Oh wow look how well this "modern warfare 2" thingy sold, we need one of them! Make a game like it!" If you all want to learn something about me; I hate business men. They're slimy shitfaced bastards. They care about money and only money, no matter who needs to suffer or what needs to be done just to get their bonus. It doesn't matter if your development team is pushing 90 hour weeks with declining health so long as you get your fucking bonus. Medal of Honour reeks of a "business man" decision.

I know someone will inevitably tell me "Gaming companies are businesses first and need money." How MUCH money exactly? I don't think people really understand the business world. When a company "loses money" it just means their revenue dropped, it doesn't mean they actually had more of an expenditure than they did revenue. So when a bank, for instance, says "we lost 1 billion dollars this year!" it simply means instead of making 40 billion dollars like they did last year they made 39 billion dollars. It's the exact same with the games industry when we hear these ludicrous claims. I can assure you that developers do not give a shitting fuck that their last game only sold 1 million copies and that wasn't enough for upper management.

So now that I've kind of sidetracked and ranted, I further want to claim that making another modern shooter isn't just assured money like I'm sure some suit thinks is. There is a little thing called over-saturation. Look at all the "X Hero" music games. No one gives half a fuck anymore. Activision turned a cash cow into a dead horse so they could beat it some more. When you keep making these games people stop caring. Why does NO ONE in the industry making decisions want to do ANYTHING unique at all?

This is the main gripe I've had for a long time. The indie scene, I must admit, has given me some amazing and original titles and for that I thank them. But we've seen nothing but stagnation for like 10 years now. Everything is just copying everything else. Remember WW2 shooters? Why did barely ANY of them take place on the pacific front? You know there was a war over there too, right gaming companies? You could have given us something familiar but different at the same time. COD5 actually did have pacific missions which were actually interesting to play, so I feel it's a reasonable enough point.

I want someone out there to take a chance and deviate EVEN JUST A TINY BIT from the modern shooter formula. We need people in charge who care about games again. Someone save us!