We now have a release date for the new Medal of Honor (the one with the big beards): October 15, 2010. That’s Teachers’ Day in Brazil!
An interesting move by EA here, and I’ll explain why… right now!
This holiday season there will be at least three big first-person shooters competing for your hard-earned money. There’s Medal of Honor, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Halo: Reach. Of the three, Halo is the only one that’s not multi-platform; it will only be available for the Xbox 360. (Maybe that’s why Bungie signed that deal with Activision, so it can develop games for other systems for a change?) The other two will at least be available for the 360 and PS3 (not sure if CoD will have a PC version, but I know MoH will).
I really cannot envision a scenario where “the average gamer” spends $180+ on three games that are essentially the same within the span of a few months.
I mean, if you were to buy CoD, why would you want MoH? Both involve you shooting AK-47s at “bad guys,” and both will surely have deep-ish multi-player modes.
Never mind that Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 would have come out only a few months before their release. It’s not like there’s been a dearth of multi-player shooters.
Halo may end up being quite a big deal, if only because it’s the last Halo game planned. You know Microsoft will spend zillions promoting it.
Right now, the order is MoH in October and CoD in November. Halo doesn’t have a release date, but I’m going to guess September, if only because that’s when ODST and Halo 3 came out.
Do we really need all these first-person shooters? Do we even want them? I guess that’s what the sales numbers are for. I’m certain that all three will be perfectly fine games, but it seems like too much, too soon, too often.