Medal of Honor VR game and its realistic World War II shooting to take players out of comfort zone with real stories from veterans
- Developer Respawn plans for MoH: Above and Beyond to alternate between tense missions and documentary footage of war veterans retelling their stories
- Studio CEO Vince Zampella wants to hit home the things that really happened, something the realistic VR setting will help to do
If anything should put Vince Zampella at ease, one would assume it would be the topic of video game warfare. He is, after all, responsible for a large amount of video game carnage, one of the things that has led to him becoming one of the most recognisable figures of the modern gaming era.
With his development studio Respawn Entertainment, he has been an architect of sci-fi shooter Titanfall. Previously, with Infinity Ward, he helped define the Call of Duty franchise before an acrimonious split with Activision. Even earlier, with the studio 2015, he contributed to the Medal of Honor franchise, which often features front-line battle action. And yet five minutes into an interview Zampella is struggling to hold back tears as he recalls a visit to Arlington National Cemetery, a military cemetery in the US state of Virginia.
What sparked the memory was a seemingly straightforward question about Respawn’s reboot of Medal of Honor, a release that will essentially take Zampella back to his roots. “Had to start with this one,” he says, briefly burying his face in his hands.
Rather, Respawn, in reviving the long-dormant Medal of Honor franchise, has several ambitious ideas for adding heft to interactive entertainment. One of them is to intermix real World War II stories with gameplay, alternating tense, sweat-inducing missions – one in which we’ll infiltrate a Nazi palace to steal and burn documents – with documentary footage of war veterans retelling their stories.