It was a long time coming—longer than the gap between the announcement of the iPad 3 and the iPad 4—but Electronic Arts has finally released another military shooter.
The game is called Medal of Honor Warfighter. It's EA's first military shooter since 2011's Battlefield 3 (we're not counting this past winter's sci-fi first-person shooter Syndicate).
They make a lot of these kinds of games. Before MOH:W and BF3, there was, of course, BBC and AO2.
Why, in the past five years, we got…
2008
Army of Two
Battlefield Bad Company
2009
Battlefield 1943
Battlefield Heroes
2010
Army of Two: The 40th Day
Battlefield Bad Company 2
Medal of Honor
2011
Battlefield Play4Free
Battlefield 3
2012
Medal of Honor: Warfigher
That's 10 military shooters. Almost two a year! (Not counting map packs and expansions.)
Some may say that military shooters are inherently bad. They're not.
Some might say this is all EA does. Not true! They also make Dead Spaces, FIFAs, SimCitys and a whole lot more.
But who would dare accuse them of neglecting the military FPS? No one.
Coming next year from EA: Battlefield 4, another Army of Two and *maybe* whatever the former creators of Medal of Honor and Call of Duty are cooking up next. Plus: Crysis 3, but we're not going to count that.
What about EA's rival, big bad Activision? We won't count their James Bond FPSes. We didn't count EA's either. (You know, we didn't count EA's sci-fi shooter Crysis games, either. Ditto: Bulletstorm since it was a space-pirate FPS.) From Activision, we wind up with just one Call of Duty game a year. That's five in five years. Add a few more if you want to count standalone portable games, but Activision still can't match EA's military shooter fervor.
Man, why is EA so into making games like these? Any ideas?
Chart via Gamasutra
(Note: An earlier version of this story mistakenly featured a shot of the non-EA shooter SOCOM in the lead image and has since been removed; it also incorrectly ID'd the Army of Two games, which this author had played through (!), as first-person shooters. I apologize for the errors.)