There are a few things that we’ve done with Men of Valor that we are particularly proud of, and I hope you enjoy them while playing the game. We have tried to make our environments the most detailed and authentic ever seen in a military first person shooter for the console, and we’re very happy with the way the dense jungles and cluttered urban ruins help reinforce the cover-based gameplay and generate a unique, Vietnam-specific experience. We had to sacrifice current buzzword features like normal mapping and per-pixel lighting to be able to handle the incredible amount of overlapping foliage and underbrush, but we think you’ll agree that the tradeoffs were worth it.
We took a bit of a risk on this project with our mature storyline and salty dialog - it took a bit of convincing to get Walmart to stock the game - but we felt that the subject matter deserved an adult treatment. Now that we’ve seen how the levels move the player naturally through a deeper and more complex narrative by far than any previous war shooter, we’re glad that we insisted on the M rating and that Vivendi had the vision to accept it. Dealing with race, violence, and other issues of the war is somewhat new for FPS, but we’re willing to bet that the genre and the audience is mature enough to support this.
Finally, we feel that the atmosphere of combat turned out very well. The precise aim feature, that allows you to lean out from cover to take careful shots, when combined with the density of trees and other cover objects and the AI’s ability to use them nearly as well as you, create the kind of tactical intensity that we perceived in our research of Vietnam action reports and combat footage. The bleeding damage system that rewards the player for taking care of his wounds, and the need to search bodies for additional health, weapons, or ammunition in the midst of a firefight, really add to the number of interesting decisions the player needs to make during gameplay and we think this makes MOV play quite differently from any other FPS. We also tried to make the audio components of our firefights equally intense, with the interactive music and dynamic battle chatter systems that really capitalize on the features of the console.
John Whitmore
Director of Development
2015