The name "Medal of Honor" must be familiar to everyone. In the early years, it was called the FPS Big Three by players along with Battlefield and Call of Duty, and became a childhood memory for many players.
Today, Call of Duty and Battlefield in the "Big Three" are still active in the public eye, but the "Medal of Honor" has disappeared for many years and has not returned to its former glory.
The Medal of Honor is a dark horse in military shooters. The original work was initiated by the famous director Stephen Spielberg, intending to let the new generation of young people who are not interested in "Saving Private Ryan" through the game to experience the heroic deeds in this legendary war. After Spielberg transferred the franchise rights to EA, the Medal of Honor series has been a success, both on consoles and on PC.
A team that only developed a game expansion called SIN spent two years developing this new generation of Medal of Honor and sending it to EA for distribution, which caused a huge sensation at the time and created a masterpiece.
Then there's Medal of Honor: Joint Attack, a cinematic narrative first-person shooter. Almost every frame of the game borrows footage from the movie "Saving Private Ryan", adding some excitement and humanity to the already fun game.
A year later, Medal of Honor: Battlefront, developed by EA Los Angeles, combined with the design concept of Joint Attack, became the best-selling title in the series to this day. Several developers at 2015 Games Studios, including Jason West and Vincent Zampella, independently founded Infinity Ward Studios, which continued the design concept of Joint Strike to develop the original Call of Duty.
While competitors shifted the background of the game, "Medal of Honor" adhered to the setting of World War II, developed works such as "Pacific War" and "Airborne Forces", and also added many unique features to the series. It wasn't until the word-of-mouth sales of these works were dismal that EA finally moved the stage to modern times.
The modernization of the "Medal of Honor" series did not go well, and in the end the series silently withdrew in the glory of its predecessors. The reason is that the modernization process of the series was too late, "Call of Duty" began to move the setting to modern times in 2007, and the "Battlefield" series launched the modern setting "Battlefield 2" in 2005. When Medal of Honor finally caught its last train in 2010, its single-player campaign and unsuccessful multiplayer made it a crushing defeat in similar games.
The sequel Medal of Honor: Warrior, released in 2012, put a lid on the coffin lid of the classic shooter franchise amid disappointing sales and mediocre reviews and criticism from the gaming press. Dismal sales also forced EA to freeze the series, and the Danger Close Games studio was also disbanded and reorganized into DICE Los Angeles, and the progress and achievements brought by the entire series collapsed under this tragic failure.
In the late fall of 2020, the orthodox sequel to the Medal of Honor "Beyond the Peak" was officially released. This generation of Medal of Honor is a VR work that must use a VR device that can be connected to a computer, namely the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or Valve Index. I just don't know if this famous IP that has experienced ups and downs can be brought back to life or even revived to another peak, let's wait and see...