Okay Geek Farm
Medal of Honor's Multiplayer is an unbalanced mess
Mike Kmiecik
The multiplayer in Medal of honour 2010 is what everyone expected it to be — a soon realized rip off of Call of Duty, but we were expecting nothing less because if it didn’t rip off Call of Duty, it wouldn’t have even registered on the game radar.
The problem I have with Medal of Honor’s multiplayer is it takes a tea spoon from Call of Duty’s customization stuff and then does nothing to balance the issues that they present. Here’s what I mean — essentially, you pick between 3 classes to spawn as, like a Riflemen, Sniper and SpecOps. Riflemen and snipers are no brainers and SpecOps is supposed to be a CQC type class, but really they are just riflemen with faster shooting assault rifles and a rocket launcher instead of a grenade launcher, which makes me scratch my head.
From my experience, early on it’s pretty nice. The over powered BS weapons are inconceivable but it seems everyone is just as confused as you are as to the layout of the map, which means there is not a lot of camping (which is a good thing), but the issue that exists is that each class seems to lack its own niche.
Zero recoil makes assault weapons just as good as sniper rifles
Rifleman can be replaced by SpecOps (and arguably SpecOps can do the rifleman job better) and snipers are generally not needed at all. I’ve seen riflemen in sniper positions with light machine guns shooting at the snipers across the map. It comes out to that snipers are not good in close range (obviously) but riflemen and SpecOps are surprisingly good at ranges you would expect a sniper to be. All the SpecOps are close quarters guys and they can shoot with un-human accuracy even while going full auto on you.
I bought the limited edition so my SpecOps gets instant exclusive access to a nice SMG (its kind of like a military grade uzi), and while in iron sights I can shoot with almost pin point accuracy, and since the rate of fire is jacked up you have an advantage against snipers and riflemen because even though the bullets do less damage, its made up for with the ridiculous rate of fire. Snipers have two weapons they can choose from later in the ranks — combat rifles (semi auto rifles with horrible scopes) and bolt action rifles (actually puts the snipe in sniper by giving you a high powered scope, but only after ranking up to get it).
Bolt action is a one shot kill anywhere on the body, but its bolt action, meaning if you miss, you come out of the scope to pull the bolt and the guy you just shot at is now in cover and the loud noise has just broadcasted your location via mini map to all the enemy players close enough to care — and also, this game does something I really hate — it puts no emphasis on stealth, yet it tries to make it look like stealth is the “unbeatable strategy”.
Tons of times I get killed by enemies right in front of me because the environment and the shadows conceal him enough to make me hold my fire for a second to check if he is really there and on top of that, there are tons of little things that pop up above cover that look like an idiot sticking his head up but when you shoot it, it turns out to be a dangling piece of wood (and the shot has given away your position of course).
Essentially there is no stealth component and anything which looks like stealth is actually an accident a.k.a. “the environment messing with peoples eyes making them double check your actually there” — you’re not being a ninja… sorry.
When silencers made an appearance, I was really exited about getting them but they don’t help a heck of a lot. Sure when you make your shots it hides your ass on the mini map, but they reduce your weapons range and damage. So when you attack someone using the same weapon as you (and you have a silencer) unless you take him by surprise, he will kill you. There’s not much point to putting them on, unfortunately and getting behind someone is all luck, you really have no idea that they are there and if you do, you don’t know if they are tunnel visioning through a scope or pointing a shotgun at the door your about to walk through. Multiplayer as a whole can be fun (especially early on), but most of the time the map, class, upgrades and weapon specs literally advocate camping. Campers always top the scores if they know what they are doing.
If you can camp, then pick a class that feels nice to camp in and go nuts because you’re going to have a great time. If your like me and can’t stand sitting in the same position for more than half a minute without getting to kill someone, it will stagnate to being insta-killed by the campers every time you step forward. Also the spawn points randomly swap after a certain amount of time. So if you get into the enemies spawning area and set yourself up to insta-kill them from behind the moment they spawn, the game will arbitrarily decide to swap them so your own team is now spawning in front of you.
Also when you finally take an opposing position from the campers after many deaths on your part (and your team), the switch happens and you realize that you’ve pointed all your guns in the wrong direction and the enemy can jog in from behind and gut you and your team mates alive, wracking up kill chains, then call artillery on your new spawn point as soon as you respawn and then you’ll have to face a never ending cycle of artillery. Multiplayer is unbalanced and unfair.
I’d like to hit on the controversy over playing as the Tali Ban in multiplayer. They are called OpFor (opposing forces) now and apparently their decision to put them in as what they are (regardless of the opposition) faltered when boycott groups started popping up. My opinion is its trivial. Really, back in the 1930s when little kids would play army with their wooden guns, someone had to be the bad guy and at that time the bad guys were the Nazis.
I actually see pictures of it in history text books and they make no mention of parents and other concerned citizens crying out against 7 year old children playing as a genocidal political party (Nazi zombies anyone?), so why is there a huge deal over 18+ year olds playing as people who rank lower than a local militia on the scale of military power? Even with the name change, it is so loosely concealed.
I got a kill streak once while playing as an OpFor and my character yelled out something in his native language and I heard in that sentence him cry out “Ala”. EA said they didn’t care what people thought and that they felt that it was harmless and it would show people that playing as the bad guys does not turn people into serial killers. Profits got in the way though so they changed it to keep those numbers from plummeting, and you can’t blame them.
The MoH series has been dormant for a while. The its first game in a few years could not afford to be killed before it was even released. I’ve been a fan of MoH for a long time (more so than CoD, even with their most recent titles being acclaimed as the best in the genre), and the advice I will offer is stay the course, the patching and DLC should start soon and then we can take another look and see if MoH can bring a balanced experience to Multiplayer.
A little thing that made me laugh, some british guy wrote an article saying playing as the Tali Ban made the game unbritish (because apparently the British have been fighting them for a long time too) and that he would not endorse such an unbritish game. My reaction was literally: “Dude, it’s made by Americans, how much more unbritish can you get?”
