14 DAY TRIAL // After announcing Medal of Honor: Warfighter, the sequel to 2010’s Medal of Honor reboot, producer Greg Goodrich has talked about the controversy regarding the mention of Talibans in the previous game’s multiplayer mode.
Medal of Honor wanted to realistically portray missions of select Tier 1 Operations, aka Spec Ops members or Navy SEALs, both in its single-player story and in the multiplayer mode. As such, during online matches, players could either choose the Tier 1 team or the Taliban one.
This led to a massive controversy, with the media saying that the decision was in poor taste, while soldiers and their families were inundating publisher EA and developer Danger Close with angry letters.
According to Greg Goodrich, the producer of both the 2010 game and the upcoming Warfighter, that was an intense period in his life and he was close to quitting the project on a couple of occasions due to the pressure.
The developer told the latest issue of Game Master that he was caught between the “desires of a mega-publisher and those of a community of highly-trained killers,” with the former being EA and the latter consisting of the actual Tier 1 Operators, who were consulting with Goodrich and his team on the game.
"There were a lot of things going on. There were two specific incidents when I decided I just couldn't do it. Everything that these guys have built and lived for over the last 15-20 years of their careers is now in my hands. I took that very seriously and had a lot of sleepless nights and did a lot of staring at my ceiling thinking 'what have I gotten myself into?'"
In the end, EA and Danger Close renamed the Taliban team the Opposing Faction and donated lots of money to military charities in order to calm down the soldiers and their families.
With Warfighter, let’s hope that the two companies will manage to avoid such controversies.