Danger Close's upcoming Medal of Honor: Warfighter is a safe sequel in some ways, a risky one in others. Somewhat disappointingly, it's abandoned its predecessor's controversial focus on one particular real-world setting and one particular real-world conflict. But it does have something interesting in its sights - relationships between elite undercover soldiers and their families.
The studio's Richard Farrelly thinks it's this that will allow the game to compete with obvious elephant-in-the-room Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 this winter, rather than a bulkier feature set. "I think that hitting it from that angle is the way we separate ourselves," he told Games.On.Net. "By not trying to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak, with that kind of "feature arsenal." You know what I mean? I like those... other games. They do what they do really well. I play those games, and so do the devs I work with.
Danger Close executive producer Greg Goodrich has said that he doesn't want to "pick a fight" with Call of Duty, as this would tarnish the reputations of the Tier 1 Operatives whose escapades the game is modelled on.
Farrelly presumably agrees, though he didn't shy from picking fights with Metacritic. "The Metacritic rating was a lot lower than what we would've liked. I'm gonna save my comments on what I think about that site! But you know what? It was the best-selling Medal of Honor ever. It came up on 6 million units sold.
"No one ever mentions that. We're really proud of that. I think there was a really high bar of expectation set for us, and maybe we didn't meet certain aspects of that. The single-player campaign had its issues, but overall I think it stands on its own two feet - and we've definitely been listening to the feedback over the past few years, and we've been addressing a lot of things."
