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DICE on MOH's past, present and future

"Very exciting secrets" to be revealed.

Eurogamer Don't open betas help?
Patrick Liu

Oh yeah, they do help. Absolutely. We get a lot of useful feedback from the community there. Still, there will be more differences later on, because as people learn the game, they will behave differently, also. We try to tackle that as well.

Eurogamer Last week EA announced Medal of Honor had sold two million copies since launch. Congratulations. As creators of the game, do you care about sales?
Patrick Liu

Yeah. I care. Obviously I'm very happy for that. I wouldn't say it's the main driving force, really. It's the process of making the game and releasing it – that's the height of it. Sales numbers are all good. It makes our company happy. It makes us happy.

Eurogamer Now you've had a bit of time to reflect on Medal of Honor, do you feel it turned out as well as you hoped? Are there any areas it could have been better?
Patrick Liu

We're quite happy with it. We learnt a lot in the process. It's very different from the Battlefield games. We learnt a lot about how to make different kinds of flavours.

We're always very critical of our own work, obviously. So there are a lot of things we'd like to improve, once we've seen the game out in the wild. We found most that we want to fix.

Otherwise, it's been a very interesting journey in terms of working together with another studio in this way. They [Danger Close] make the single-player part and we make the multiplayer part, which is unique in the sense that we use two different engines. We learnt a lot.

Eurogamer Was the controversy surrounding the setting of the game distracting?
Patrick Liu

Of course we were aware of what was happening around us. At the same time we needed to focus on making the actual game. For me personally, I don't mind the setting so much, whether it's controversial or not.

We focused on the gameplay. Theoretically, it could have been a sci-fi game and still have the same mechanics. That's something I hoped our PR people would take care of – the controversy.

Eurogamer Do you feel Medal of Honor met quality expectations?
Patrick Liu

The controversy did affect some reviews, I think.

Eurogamer Why?
Patrick Liu

It stirs a lot of feelings, just the setting. And that does affect people's judgement. But otherwise, this is a reboot of a franchise. It's an investment for EA as a company. We need to build upon what we have achieved so far, and just improve and improve and build up the franchise again from scratch, basically.

In that sense, I think we're off to a very good start.

Eurogamer EA said it is a big enough success to justify a sequel. Will you begin work on doing the multiplayer portion of a sequel, or was this a one-off for DICE?
Patrick Liu

We'll see. The plans aren't set yet.

Eurogamer Will you focus on DLC for Medal of Honor?
Patrick Liu

Yeah. Launching a game is really just the start. It's not the end of development. So that's where we're focusing.

Eurogamer Would DICE like the opportunity to work on Medal of Honor again? Did the team have a good enough experience to want to do another one?
Patrick Liu

Both yes and no. It would be cool to continue to develop the franchise. At the same time we have a lot of exciting stuff going on in DICE as well that we have been working on in parallel.

I'm in a very good situation in that sense. I could pick and choose. It's a win win situation.

Eurogamer Patrick Soderlund told us that Medal of Honor was reviewed harsher than it deserved. Do you agree?
Patrick Liu

Yeah. It's partly because we're in a very competitive genre. We're also competing with ourselves. Obviously we're competing with Call of Duty. It's a very tricky situation to be squeezed in between those giants.

Either the reviews are favourable, or they're not. There's nothing in between. It's polarised opinion about the game.

Patrick Liu is a veteran producer at DICE.

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