Despite Medal of Honor getting a critical flogging, Visceral says that EA is committed to winning the first person firefight.
Electronic Arts has realigned its corporate structure with with three general managers in charge of different genres. Nick Earl, head of EA’s Visceral Games arm, is in charge of the third-person action adventure leg with a second group handling MMOs and a third tackling first-person and driving games. He said that even though Earl’s group focuses on third person games, that doesn’t mean that EA is giving up the ghost on beating Activision in the FPS market. In his view, it doesn’t matter what kind of reviews Medal of Honor is getting; EA fully expects the game to be a commercial, if not a critical, success.
“We are absolutely and positively not giving up on the first-person space,” said Earl. “The reaction to Medal of Honor notwithstanding, we believe it’s certainly going to be a commercial hit.”
“Battlefield is a very strong franchise in the first-person space. We’re going to continue to pursue first-person – but I’m personally completely laser-focused on the third-person action-adventure space,” Earl said. “It has nothing to do with our success or lack of [success] in the first-person space.”
So there you have it. Medal of Honor may not be the best shooter ever created by human beings (check back tomorrow for Steve Butts’ review) but EA still believes that it can contend with Call of Duty for the FPS crown. And if MoH is a miss, maybe the Battlefield game will hit with audiences a little better.
Source: Gamasutra
Published: Oct 14, 2010 05:00 pm