Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Preview

During the WWII, allied soldiers had one and one thing only in their minds (no, not that, you filthy perverts) - it was their ultimate goal: Conquer the Berlin. The road to the German capital was a harsh one in those days, especially with the German war machinery still around, and this is exactly what Electronic Arts' Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is all about.

Relying on the success of the Medal of Honor (MoH), their blockbuster from 1999, EA joined forces with 2015, an experienced developer team that mainly dealt with various mission packs, mods and add-ons for different games (they did the add-on for Sin). MoH was based on a remodeled Quake III engine, which is for the first time used to depict large outdoor spaces, like the legendary Omaha beach, where the allied forces landed into Normandy.

Being sort of an homage to the famous First Ranger battalion, MoH will let you play the role of Mike Powell, a colonel in this unit in the very dawn of allied invasion of North Africa. Later, he gets recruited to OSS for performing special tasks typical for the members of the special forces of US army. The first mission, the war campaign also known as "Operation Torch", presents only the beginning of the single player campaign that will progressively immerse you into the second world war and introduce you to the arsenal and mechanization of those days. As you complete your tasks and missions, you will advance through the game, frequently finding yourself in the middle of famous authentically presented battles and events from the WWII.

Even though this is a first-person-shooter, MoH has elements of squad-based games. What I am getting at is that you have to perform tasks according to your superiors' orders weather you have to act as a support in a massive offensive or clean up an enemy machine-gun-nest. This is where the NPC AI plays an important role. As the developers like to point out, the player can always enjoy a piece of the action performed by NPCs or choose his own way and act on his own. Interacting with NPCs isn't obligatory, but when you do it their reactions will strictly depend on their ad hoc AI routines.

The already mentioned modification of the Quake III engine is being used for the graphical aspect of MoH. Many suspected that the QIII engine wouldn't be capable of handling subtle transitions between huge open and confined spaces. The developers confirmed that the original engine wasn't suitable for this task, so that they modified it according to their needs. The best example for this is the long-awaited scene of landing on Omaha beach in Normandy. Developers claim that they had to adapt both the visual engine, and background AI, with an adequate audio track in order to create their vision of this event. They even hired a medical expert in order to revive the atmosphere through the dialogues in original medic-banter from the forties.