Source:
https://scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3045872/medal-honor-vr-game-and-its-realistic-world-war-ii-shooting
Lifestyle/ Entertainment

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
Screecapture of Medal of Honour

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.

It’s not just that the stakes for the upcoming Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond are higher than when he worked on the 2002 editions of the series – the company is, after all, making it into a virtual reality game, where the challenge of palatable video game killing is upped by placing participants in a surprisingly convincing, full-scale virtual expanse.

A screen capture of Medal of Honour: Above and Beyond. Source: YouTube
A screen capture of Medal of Honour: Above and Beyond. Source: YouTube

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.

One such film follows an American veteran in his 90s as he returns to the European battlefield where his friend fell. We watch as he shares hugs and stories with the family that now lives on the grounds, and cameras follow as he leads us to how and where he found his compatriot.

Zampella knows the power of these scenes, having accompanied filmmakers on some of the trips.

“I took my son with me, who was 18 at the time, and we were at Arlington Cemetery on Gold Star Mother’s Day, which is for mothers who lost their children in service. Seeing kids who were my son’s age…”

He begins to trail off as his eyes start to water, but he won’t be fully derailed. His somewhat guarded personality soon takes over to push back any potential tears and get back to a discussion of what turned out to be Respawn’s most expansive year.

Last February the studio, based in Los Angeles’ Chatsworth neighbourhood, surprise-released the instantly popular free-to-play game Apex Legends , which has been played by more than 70 million people. Then in November the studio issued Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a return for the space opera franchise to home video game consoles and arguably the least divisive of the mass-marketed Star Wars products unleashed in the last year.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was released in November and has proved a critical success for Respawn. Photo: TNS
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was released in November and has proved a critical success for Respawn. Photo: TNS

Earlier in 2019 Zampella predicted that Fallen Order, under the direction of Stig Asmussen (God of War 3), would begin to remould Respawn developers – long typecast as “multiplayer shooter guys” – into interactive storytellers. Now he’s ready to look beyond Respawn, the studio he founded in 2010 with Jason West, which was acquired in 2017 by Electronic Arts. In 2020 Zampella will also lead the Los Angeles-based offices of another Electronic Arts-owned studio, Dice.

It’s clear Zampella has ideas he’s not yet sharing on where he intends to take the Dice LA team, but Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond will present more near-term challenges. Set in the early 1940s and in development with Facebook-owned VR specialist Oculus, the game will capture the realistic tone of the early Medal of Honor games – each virtual gun, for instance, comes with a very specific set of hand gestures when it comes to reloading.

Shooting in VR is not always a comfortable gaming experience, he explains.

“As fidelity gets better and VR gets more immersive, you kind of feel like you’re there. That translates to, ‘Am I harming another more realistic-looking human?’ That’s something we’re going to have to be very wary of,” Zampella says.

“When you know the setting is life and death and it’s a historical thing – while you may be causing harm to virtual humans you’re doing it for the good of other virtual humans – in that simulation it’s something that was valuable to the world.”

Medal of Honor: Warfighter from 2012 was the last game to be released in the long-running franchise. Photo: AP
Medal of Honor: Warfighter from 2012 was the last game to be released in the long-running franchise. Photo: AP

Such questions fuel Respawn’s desire to connect in-game conflict to real-world stories and people, says the game’s lead Peter Hirschmann, whose Medal of Honor experience stretches back to the game’s early days when it was developed by DreamWorks Interactive.

“We just got a rough cut of a guy named Frank who served in the Pacific, and the stories he tells about what he went through in the submarine service are just crazy. So again, we try to help it hit home that this really happened,” Hirschmann says.

“These were 19-year-old kids. And you know, often that’s our target audience. So it’s always good if we can build empathy and ignite people’s imaginations. Then maybe they’ll come away understanding the conflict a little more.”

It’s clear Zampella thinks the studio is up to the challenge. The only time he bristles during an interview is when asked about giving up Respawn’s independent status to sell to Electronic Arts. While the latter provided some of the seed money to help launch Respawn, Zampella also spoke in the early 2010s about the creative importance of maintaining some self-sufficiency from corporate overlords.

“Did I give up my independence?” he shoots back. “… For a small studio to do as much as I want to do, it made sense for us to join forces with EA. In talking to EA, they wanted the influence of me coming in to help shape the future of EA. The industry is changing, and we have the chance to be at the forefront of that.

“Being able to take on new challenges, like Dice LA falling under me now, is exciting. I want to challenge myself. I want to do something bigger and funnerer.”

And to ensure the conversation ended on a lighthearted note, he added: “Use that word: ‘Funnerer.’”