Review – Medal of Honor Warfighter – PC

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It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a videogame review, so here’s one. I’ve always enjoyed military shooters, though my enjoyment of campaigns in these games has been steadily declining since CoD4: Modern Warfare (which I enjoyed a great deal) as Infinity Ward and all of their competitors went further and further down the “cinematic experience” rabbit hole at the expense of gameplay and player freedom. Even with this, I managed to enjoy both Battlefield Bad Company 1 and 2’s SP-offerings as well as Black Ops 1. I even played through the reboot of Medal of Honor and thought it was decent if not outstanding in any way. Which brings us to the point of this post.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter has copped a lot of flak for being terrible and a huge disappointment to EA and the public. With this knowledge I picked up the PC version of the game for about 5 bucks from an online UK retailer’s sale. A couple of weeks after it arrived, I decided to install it to my Origin Library and then decided to play it – given the usual 4? 6? 8? hour campaign length these things have, it shouldn’t take too long to zip through it, surely? Then I can play with the MP for a couple of days before getting bored and shelving it to go back to Battlefield 3 or 4 (which is a whole different set of bugs). Despite the advertisements showing that the MP allows me to play as the SASR, I held out quite easily from buying it at launch, given the huge backlog of games I have to play.

The game does *look* good.

Story-wise, the game tries to tell the story of both shooting people in the face as well as a bit of a reflection of the human costs of this sort of thing on the lives and families of the operators who live it. Unfortunately, the story (what I’ve seen of it) is told with all of the subtlety and interest of a painfully contrived soap opera. Though, I admittedly didn’t get all that far in.

Gameplay-wise, the graphics look really nice with highly detailed player and NPC models. Good looking scenery and reasonably atmospheric locales.

Unfortunately, the game crashes like a motherfucker. Right after installing it, I went to tweak the graphical settings, and the game died on me. It took about 45 minutes of poking around the web to discover that the high graphics settings appear to actually kill the game. That’s right. The game can’t handle it’s own graphical settings. Mind you, this isn’t at launch, when we’re now expected to sit through buggy software in anticipation of the miracle patch – but 15 months after release. Despite the game’s crash and burn status once it hit retail, you’d imagine that huge, gamebreaking issues like this would have been fixed, but apparently not. So after fixing that, I got to play through.

So far, so Modern FPS.

The “how to play” tutorial puts you into the shoes of a Taliban/Al-Qaeda recruit, who runs through a mock-up aircraft as the training segment as an Imam of some description yells at you in Arabic . This was a little bit interesting, and I guess makes sense as you don’t expect that veteran DEVGRU operators would need to go through any of that stuff with instructions.

There seems to be an excited emphasis on door breaching, with each breach getting overly-excited about you getting four headshots to unlock the next exciting door breach animation. So far I’ve gone from boots, to tomahawk to crowbar. Next, I unlock the shotgun. I’m so excited!

I’m using this image of a man with a gun to break up my wall of text.

I quickly found that unlike in other FPS games, including the previous instalment in this series, you can’t scroll through picked-up weapons. Obviously another bug rather than design, but I tried to swap out my pistol for an AK, and later, a PKM, and it refused to let me scroll though my weapons – only allowing (firstly) the AK and my pistol (which I had tried to replace) and later on, my LaRue OBR and pistol, without allowing me to use the PKM that I was carrying around.

So anyway, after a cinematic bit involving a train station in Madrid, the game shit itself again, then sort-of recovered, and resumed with the next cutscene, except that when it “recovered”, the game was now running in 480×720 (as opposed to 1920×1080) and attempts to reset the graphic settings from ingame didn’t work – necessitating a quit out which turned into yet another crash. Rebooting and reloading left it again at 720, though without the crash..

After three or four tries, I got around this by manually editing one of the game’s profiles. Credit to swagrhino on the EA answer forums for the temporary fix.

editing MyDocuments\MOHW\settings PROF_SAVE_profile

Change the values of the following keys

GstRender.MotionBlurEnabled 1
GstRender.OverallGraphicsQuality 3
GstRender.ResolutionScale 5
GstRender.ShaderQuality 2.0000

Still, this continued to result in the same repeated crash/graphic reset to 480p for the car chase scene, which I eventually got around by playing it in a 480p-sized window in the middle of my monitor. When I got to the next walking-around-and-shooting mission, in the Philippines, I set the graphics back to 1080 and went with lower-level arthoscopic filtering (2x instead of 3x, which is how I ran the game initially) and a lower refresh rate 27.9fps instead of the 60fps I used earlier – in the hope that it would run with more stability. The result? Gameplay of about 3fps with massive stuttering. So I turned it off.

Since trying the above yet again to reset the graphics, followed by manually setting them to realistic levels (that I used for this game initially, and use for BF3 et al), the game once again shit itself and crashed out. At this point, I give up.

Despite impressive visuals, this is a BAD game. DO NOT purchase it. Even for a fiver.

So my review ends thus:

Shooting seemed okay, story bland but I’m sure you could sleepwalk through it. Super-linear non-interactive set-piece-oriented FPS gameplay, which I don’t especially enjoy. The changes in locale looked promising but I never got to play them because the game is so unstable. Given my experience with the game (I’ve spent more time trying to get it to work than actually playing it – quite literally!)

Verdict – avoid at all costs. This game deserved to fail, and fail hard. Which is what it did. If EA had given the devs the opportunity to finish the game, it might well have been fun. Instead it serves as yet another example of how Electronic Arts continually pushes unfinished and/or broken games out the door (along with BF3, BF4, SimCity, et al) which may never be fixed or patched to a properly working state. Like this one.

New Year’s Hobby Resolutions 2014

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Pictured: Leonard doing what I *still* feel like doing.

So I guess it’s that time again, the year is done, the party is over  – Time to reflect on the year that was and blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda.

I had a kind-of painting goal for 2013. Even when I set it, I knew it was unrealistic. It was to finish 365 “things“. So that included finishing half-painted figures, individual pieces of terrain, rebasing, renovating and touching up old models, and, oh yeah! – and painting stuff from start to finish. A modest goal, compared to the many people out there who seem to manage to paint entire armies in a couple of months, but a laudable one, nonetheless.

Pictured: Some stuff that got painted or renovated in 2013. Except for 2 of the dwarves.

Unfortunately, I came up with it in March, after more than three solid months of partying playing World of Warcraft – so I was 3 months down to begin with. By day 226 I had 124 completed, and by the end of the year I had 142 models painted. Not too bad, and my best year in many, if not ever – though it does include a lot of “updated’ models and doesn’t even touch the amount I bought this year… 

Pictured: Some of the backlog. A lot of this stuff arrived this year.

I’ve had my 2014 goal planned since I came up with the 2013 one, though – Finish painting more figures than I did in the preceding year. Which I’ll continue on with, probably till I drop dead. The “stretch goal” will once again be to try and finish 365 figures.

More specifically this coming year, I want to get a few projects done, across a few genres:

Fantasy:
Finish the 2k pts Ogre Army for KoW
Paint a 2k pts Dark Elf/Twilight Kin Army for KoW
Paint a 300?600? pt Allied Detatchment for KoW to ally with others (Giant, Trebuchet, Wolves)
Paint an Undead Army for KoW using GW, Mantic and LotR Undead (also doubles as an Army of the Dead for LotR SBG and WotR!)
Finish a ton of Men of Gondor for SBG/WotR and KoW armies of Man

Pictured: Not yet 2k points of KoW Ogres, with some older stuff and a Contemptor from Damo.

40k:

Resurrect/update my previously-finished old Dark Angels Combat Patrol into a 6th Edition 600-pt Combat Patrol
Paint 600-odd points of Deathwing as a CP
Paint 600-odd points of Ravenwing as a CP
Add some extra DA stuff back in – like the almost-finished Dreadnought, Asmodai, etc and Bingo! 2k+ point DA army!

Pictured: Finished 2E and 3E-style Dark Angels models with some WIP Ogres. Proper gallery to come later when the updated force starts getting put together…

Resurrect/finish/update my old 3.5-edition Iron Warriors CP force into a 2013-edition 600-pt Combat Patrol, then expand into 2k points or so.
Resurrect/update my 3rd-edition Mentor Legion Marine army into a 2013-edition army (including a Combat Patrol force)
When the IG codex comes out, resurrect/update my 2nd/3rd-edition IG army into a 2014-edition army (including several Combat Patrol forces)
When the IG codex comes out, resurrect/finish/update my 3rd-edition Deathworld/Jungle Fighters/Ogryn/Sentinel Maori-themed IG CP into a 2014-edition Combat Patrol force.
When the Tyranid codex comes out, resurrect/update my old Tyranid CP force into a 2014-edition 600-pt Combat Patrol.

Pictured: Formerly-complete Tyranid Combat Patrol (with Aliens as CC-warriors) now needing to be updated to 6E. Also some unfinished large models.

Resurrect/finish/update my old 2005-edition Ork CP force into a 2014-edition 600-pt Combat Patrol. Despite previously being close to finished, this is one of the harder ones, since in the interim they’ve changed the way Ork units buy and allocate special/heavy weapons pretty substantially, and also halved their point values – so it will need a lot of shuffling and a busload of additional Orks to bring back up to 600pts…

So as you can see, there are a couple of themes running through there… hopefully I can make some or most of it a reality, since much of it shouldn’t involve painting too many additional models… for all but the Orks, anyway.

“Stretch Goals” for the 40k-2k/600pt-Combat Patrol project are Grey Knights and Blood Angels.

Pictured: A huge pile of junk/future wargaming room.

Also – Convert the shed into a games room, and actually play a bunch of games! The major part of the clean-up and carpeting is planned hoped to happen over the next few weeks since I have annual leave. This will allow a lot of the mess being stored in the “painting studio” to be moved out.

Pictured: A bloody mess.

This will allow me to move my “long-term” painting projects onto the actual, proper painting desk that I have, while I’ll still be able to move individual models into the living room to work on when I want to paint while being less isolated. It’ll also allow indoor/late night gaming & boardgaming to take place on the table in the living room, rather than being covered by my crap.

Pictured: Where I *should* be painting. Note how covered in crap it all is.

Pictured: Folding table in the Living Room. AKA Where I *actually* paint.

A lot of this is due to finally purchasing our own place, after renting for years and having things in storage and then living in a short-term rental for 18 months with most of our stuff in boxes. In the last year, there’s been much unpacking and lots of culling, but that stuff happens sporadically since work seems to become more demanding each year. Every so often buying some more Bookshelves or Detolf cabinets (AU$150 for a Detolf compared to US$60? Talk about regional price fixing that would make GW blush!) As well as that, I appreciate a good videogame, so I like to chill out with some Battlefield4 or GTA5 or what have you as well as working on hobby and home.

One thing it was really nice to finally get finished only a week and a half ago was turning the small “second lounge” room or whatever the hell real estate agents call them into a display space for cool crap. This room had been half-filled with boxes (literally, not figuatively) for pretty much a full year, so it really brings a smile to my face whenever I walk through it now. I’m even able to stop and look at these things now! I’ll do a proper update on the stuff in here a bit later, but here’s the room, about 90% done as it is today (move the miniature cases out, put some more stuff in the cabinets, sort out under the desk a little). Here are a couple of pics.

Pictured: Display Room, Left Side.

Pictured: Display Room, Right Side.

And yes, I’m clearly a very lucky man in that Marouda shares my enjoyment of this sort of stuff on display, and is even willing to play games and do a tiny bit of painting with me. I should point out that the consoles are all her fault, since it was at her urging that we bought our first SNES and Mega Drive, all those years ago. That’s about it for this post. I haven’t done any painting since just before Christmas, but I hope to start again in the next couple of days. So last of all, I’ll just wish…

~ A Happy 2014 to you all! ~