Medal of Honor was once supposed to shake up the shooter genre once again, but the dream fell flat. Now the last servers are shutting down.
Many, many years ago, the world was still young, Facebook was still an exciting vision of the future – and Medal of Honor was really high on the agenda. Next to Call of Duty, no other series produced such exciting World War II campaign shooters, and the race for the top was anything but decided. Then, in the fateful year of 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released … the drop was in the air.
Instead of driving innovation, the Medal of Honor series got lost somewhere between Battlefield and Call of Duty in the years that followed, darting in the slipstream of competitor trends and losing its own identity. In 2011, Medal of Honor (2011) competed unsuccessfully with Battlefield 3, and its successor Warfighter did so poorly in 2012 that EA basically discontinued support immediately.
And now all multiplayer servers of the last Medal of Honors are also being shut down.
The end for Medal of Honor
It”s hard to believe, but even 2010”s Medal of Honor was still being played to this day – by what felt like seven people worldwide, but those same people went about it with great passion:
But that”s over now. On 16 February 2023, EA (by its own account) will finally shut down the following games:
- Medal of Honor (2011) on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
- Medal of Honor: Airborne on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
- Medal of Honor: Warfighter on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
The shutdown is quite regular as part of regular shutdowns for older EA games. Some of the really old (and really good) series parts were already deactivated ten years ago. After the shutdown you can still play the single player campaigns of Warfighter and Co.
This move marks what is probably the final nail in the coffin of a series that hasn”t been able to get its foot in the door for over a decade. After the unsuccessful Warfighter, EA had written off the series anyway, then in 2019 the VR spin-off Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond ebbled to the surface once more, but it pretty much flopped with the critics.
The multiplayer of Medal of Honor (2011) was not a complete disaster, but simply a mix of the big maps of Battlefield with the fast casual infantry shooting of CoD, which for people offered too little own identity, too little exciting innovation and too little alternative in a genre that was gradually losing momentum at the time with umpteen Modern Military freeloaders.
