EA Game president Frank Gibeau believes that the once great Medal of Honor franchise was ruined by annual releases and poor multiplayer options, as reported by Gamasutra. Rebooting with a move to modern day Afghanistan, the new Medal of Honor has been slated for release on October 15th in Europe.
Speaking to Gamasutra in an interview, the EA executive said that he believes annual releases of the series drained innovation.
"I think any franchise that"s been around for a long time, they get in a rut, they become over-annualized. They run out of innovation," he said. "The team pounds on a game every year, and they get tired, they run out of time and effort to be innovative and try and take some new risks. That was my view on how the franchise has fallen."
However, Gibeau also believes that the game"s multiplayer options also began to let it down.
"I also felt like the online component wasn"t getting enough attention. Any shooter worth its salt is going to be really breakthrough in its online play, and I think Battlefield: Bad Company is a good example of that, I think Modern Warfare 2 is a good example of that, I think Halo clearly is a good example of that. The power of a franchise in the shooter category is in the online component and modes."
"With Medal of Honor, we felt like we needed to take creative risks with the IP, we need to put together a world-class development team to bring that product to life, and as part of the feature set, online needed to be a significant part of the offer and the design," he continued before offering a tease about what"s to come from medal of Honor. "The DICE guys, the Battlefield 1943 team were able to partner with our LA squad and they"re doing some pretty remarkable stuff online for MOH that you guys will find out more about this summer."
It was announced by EA Games earlier today that the new Medal of Honor will hit European shelves on October 15th.