Everything is shot around the perspective of the character. In Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, the camera never leaves your eyes. That’s an entire movie’s worth of narrative performance supplementing the gameplay and rounding out the story. The team shot over 120 pages of performance capture for the game. Manon’s introduction in the original 1999 Medal of HonorĪbove and Beyond is filled with references fans of the franchise may recognize, and the team was able to flesh out these characters far more than in the past. Gronek, a helpful rocket scientist you may recall from the original 1999 Medal of Honor. Manon Batiste, a fiery French Resistance fighter, who has featured in nearly every Medal of Honor game, is back and heavily involved in the story, along with Dr. Fans of the franchise will also recognize several returning characters. While many of the details remain top secret, you can expect to storm the beach at Omaha, infiltrate a secret Nazi V-2 Rocket facility on the island of Peenemünde, and use a disguise to sneak onboard a German U-Boat.īy your side for much of the action will be two new characters, a grizzled but thoughtful sergeant who’s seen the terrible toll of combat, and a young British medic eager to fight back against the Nazis. Your missions will take you from Tunisia to across Europe, participating in some of the biggest moments of the war. It allows us to put players in situations where the stakes are very high,” he said.
“The OSS undertook key missions during the war and helped to turn the tide. It was the perfect vehicle for the kind of story Peter wanted to tell. The OSS, forerunner of the modern CIA, was established to conduct espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines during WWII. In Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, you’ll be taking on the role of a combat engineer who is recruited to join the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). So what can players expect from the mission ahead?Ībove and Beyond is a tale of human experiences, how ordinary people, citizen soldiers, reacted to one of the most significant events in human history. “We’ve been able to talk to people that lived through it, from all different walks, French Resistance, on Omaha Beach at D-Day.” Those conversations (along with extensive research) led Peter and the team to “create a story that taps into those truths, inspired by what they went through.” While the campaign narrative isn’t based directly on their accounts, they helped in getting the emotional details right. That ethos means paying close attention to details -from unit emblems to weapon sounds- but equally important is the “need to be accurate about the emotional truth of it.” The team spent four years and hundreds of hours interviewing World War II vets about their experiences. While the technology has changed drastically, the goal has always remained the same: “to be grounded and emotionally authentic, to be as true as we can to the experiences of people that fought through it and lived through it,” Peter told us.
He wrote and directed the original 1999 Medal of Honor. Peter Hirschmann has been telling the Medal of Honor story for twenty years.