EA really wants the first-person shooter crown. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and the freshly announced reboot of the Medal of Honor series are both set for release next year, and CEO John Riccitiello has now made it perfectly clear that with these two FPS offerings EA has Activision’s annual Call of Duty franchise in its sights, “I’m not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow, but in the way that Activision sort of alternates sequels of Modern Warfare and Call of Duty and owns the leadership position in FPS, between Medal of Honor and Battlefield, I want it back.”
And they’re going to get there with “innovation and quality” in tow, he says, with some of that coming in the form of multiplayer gameplay from DICE, “The first [Bad Company] did very well in its first outing. The next one is a heck of a lot better and it looks like a worthy competitor to Modern Warfare. We think we’ve got an advantage over Modern Warfare 2 with our multiplayer. The guys at DICE do that really, really well [DICE has also been tapped to create the multiplayer of the new Medal of Honor].”
Riccitiello also has some praise for Modern Warfare developer Infinity Ward, along with something else, “I think the Infinity Ward guys are great. … I’m a fan of a lot of our competitors’ products. But if you’ve played Modern Warfare, and you’ve played the first one — and you’ve played the last Call of Duty — it’s sort of starting to feel like they’re making the same game again.”
