Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is releasing later this week on December 11th for PC VR headsets via SteamVR and the Oculus PC client. You can play the game easily on an Oculus Quest if you’ve got a powerful VR gaming PC, but there’s no firm news on a Quest-native port just yet.
Unedited gameplay footage is not allowed to be shared just yet — the preview and review guidelines were very clear that any footage must be edited into a video preview to be shared. Since the review itself is fast-approaching I’m just focusing my efforts on that video instead.
My entire time with Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond has been on an Oculus Quest 2. I’ve tried it using both Oculus Link and using Virtual Desktop and I can say without a doubt I prefer it with Virtual Desktop.
If you want to play Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond on Quest you have two options: Oculus Link or Virtual Desktop. Oculus Link should have less latency, which means you won’t perceive any delay at all between what you’re doing and what you see in the headset, but you’ve got a cord dangling from your head. Virtual Desktop on the other hand is a fully wireless way of connecting to your PC, however depending on your Wi-Fi signal and router quality you may perceive a small amount of latency.
For me personally, I prefer Virtual Desktop every single time. Guy Godin’s software is incredible and it allows me to access both my SteamVR and Oculus PC Store libraries, at once, without ever needing to connect my Quest to my PC with an actual cord.
To be frank, playing PC VR games wirelessly is extremely liberating. The visual fidelity is far beyond what a standalone headset such as the Quest is capable of, so being able to experience high-end VR, such as Medal of Honor and other PC-exclusive games, from the ease of access found within a wireless standalone device, feels like magic.
After playing games like Onward, Contractors, Solaris, and more on Quest natively, I didn’t want to go back to a wired experience — especially with Medal of Honor VR’s multiplayer — so I simply didn’t and it works great.
Granted, I’ve got a strong home network and a very good connection speed. Things download very quickly for me and that’s a major factor when considering how playable a VR game would be for you over a streamed wireless connection. But if your internet is up to snuff, this is absolutely the best way to enjoy Medal of Honor VR. I did not notice any added latency, at least not that I know of, was able to get in the top 3 of most multiplayer matches, and had no trouble playing through a lot of the campaign as well.
Do you plan on playing Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond and if so, would you do it wirelessly using an Oculus Quest and Virtual Desktop? Let us know down in the comments below!
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is finally releasing this week for PC VR on the Oculus Home store and Steam. I’ve spent most of the past five or so days digging into the campaign and playing multiplayer. I can’t render a verdict just yet, but I can tell you everything you need to know about multiplayer in Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond.
If you’re just interested in knowing what I think of the multiplayer and reading my hands-on impressions, you can read that here. The rest of this article is intended to round up all the details about the mode and give you the information you need to know.
Below we’ve rounded up all the info on Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond’s game modes, weapons, loadouts, character skins, progression system, multiplayer maps, bot functionality, how servers work, and whether or not to expect any post-launch support.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond Game Modes
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond has five different game modes for multiplayer. When queuing up for a game you can either pick a specific mode to try and match for, or pick Quick Play to load into whatever is most readily available at the time. All modes hold up to 12 players with team games offering 6v6 matches.
Deathmatch:
This is exactly what it sounds like. Twelve players are plopped into a map with infinite respawns to try and get the most kills before the timer runs out. Default match length is five minutes.
Team Deathmatch:
This is exactly like Deathmatch but it’s two teams of six instead. Everything else is identical. A basic game mode, but it’s usually the most popular choice in any online shooter for good reason.
Mad Bomber:
This one is pretty unique. On the surface it’s more or less just Deathmatch, however there is an interesting twist on the idea. Rather than just getting points for kills, every person in the match also has a timed explosive they can place on literally any surface. Once placed it starts a 30-second countdown. If you get any kills with your bomb (they have a huge explosion — if you can hear the timer ticking that means you’re in the blast zone) then you get lots of bonus points. You get bonus points for disarming other bombs as well.
Domination:
This one works just like you’d expect if you’ve ever played Call of Duty before. There are three capture points across the map (A, B, and C) and you’re split into two teams of six. You need to capture and hold a position to gain points and the longer you hold it the more points you get. Holding multiple positions grants more points over time. You also get points for kills. This is the most tactical of the game modes and teams that actually work together well tend to have the most success.
Blast Radius:
Of all the game modes in Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, this one is by far my favorite. It’s basically just Deathmatch with everyone fighting for themselves, but the big twist is that there is a ring that will appear periodically for you to stand inside. If you get a kill while inside that ring it’s worth 5x as many points. Since you’re typically a sitting duck in the circle, each time someone dies in the ring a single-shot rocket launcher spawns on their body to aid whoever is in the circle. Pardon the pun, but this mode is truly a blast.
Weapons and Loadouts
There aren’t many guns to pick from in Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond multiplayer — only eight in fact — but luckily they all really and truly do feel different. As of this time each loadout only has that single primary weapon — there are no sidearms or pistols in multiplayer.
Guns:
M1A1 SMG – Short range, high rate-of-fire. Very small and quick choice.
MP40 SMG – Submachine gun with slightly more reliable accuracy compared to the M1A1 but a slower rate of fire.
StG 44 – Automatic rifle with longer range but the rate of fire is slower than the comparable SMGs. A bit larger in terms of size by comparison.
Combat Shotgun – Pump-action shotgun with shells automatically loaded into the bottom once empty, but you must manually pump in between every shot. Great for close range with very high-damage.
Lever-Action Repeater – This rifle has excellent stopping power but reloading is a bit wonky with the way the lever works. Takes a bit of practice.
M1 Garand Rifle – Semi-auto rifle with an iconic ping chime as magazine ejects. Easy to reload quickly.
Gewehr 43 – Semi-auto rifle with reliable accuracy, it’s similar to the other semi-auto rifles on offer.
Gewehr 43 Scoped – This is the same as the previous gun, but it has a scope. In Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, scopes just take up your entire vision like a full-screen black screen and a scope circle in the middle — they’re not real VR scopes.
Secondary Loadout Choices:
When you choose a primary weapon during multiplayer you also get to choose secondary loadout options. This includes either three healthy syringes, a special contact-explosive Gammon Bomb grenade, or a standard frag grenade and a single healthy syringe.
Mid-Match Weapons:
Additionally, there are alternative weapons spread around every map. This includes different types of grenades, the occasional grenade launcher for instant-kills, and a few other goodies. You won’t be collecting power-ups or anything game-changing this way, but you should keep your eyes peeled for things that could grant a slight advantage in the moment.
Progressions and Character Skins
Unfortunately there is no real progression system at all in Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond’s multiplayer. There are no levels, or ranks, or anything to unlock by playing games. All guns are available from the very beginning without any option to tweak them.
At the time of this writing, the only unlockable contents are character skins which you earn by playing through the single-player campaign. Hopefully they consider at least adding weapon skins, if not more, later on.
Multiplayer Maps
There are ten total maps in Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond and they legitimately are all extremely well-designed. In many VR shooters you’ll find a lack of map variety, lack of verticality, and nothing feels organic or natural. Respawn did a great job here. I was particularly fond of the church and the overturned train on the snow level. Everything has a very distinct feel and they function well for each of the game modes.
Bots for Multiplayer
Thankfully Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond includes full bot support. This means if no one is online when you’re trying to play you can still play multiplayer matches because the game will auto-fill lobbies with bots. Alternatively, you can go into a private lobby and customize how many bots or players exist on each side. You could even set it up so you and a friend are playing against just bots and make it like a series of unofficial co-op missions.
However, it does not seem like there are any customization options for bots in terms of difficulty, what their loadouts are, their skins, etc. Perhaps that may be added in the future.
Dedicated Servers, Parties, and Private Matches
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond utilizes dedicated servers so you shouldn’t have to worry about errors getting disconnected from hosts while playing. When you first join multiplayer matchmaking the game will automatically be set to “default” which will naturally result in whatever has the lowest ping. Beyond that you’ll see a list of specific dedicated server options for Asia, Australia, Europe, US East, and US West.
In the Multiplayer lobby you can also create a party by inviting people from your friends list. From there you can launch into a public game together, as a group, or into a private match. When arranging a private match you get a few options for tweaking game settings and of course you get to pick the map and mode.
Post-Launch Support
So far there has been no indication of post-launch support plans for Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond for neither single player nor multiplayer. However, given Respawn’s history it’s entirely possible we could at least see new weapons or skins added, if not maps and game modes. Fingers crossed!
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond releases on December 11th as a PC VR-exclusive on both the Oculus Home store and SteamVR with support officially listed for Rift, Vive, and Index.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond releases this week across the Oculus PC Store and SteamVR for PC VR headsets. We can’t disclose our verdict on the game as a whole just yet, but the final preview embargo has now lifted so we can talk about our early impressions and publish thoughts on multiplayer.
In addition to Above and Beyond’s single-player campaign, you can master the distinctive handling of a host of WWII weapons and test yourself against opponents in five multiplayer modes on sites across Europe.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond Multiplayer Impressions
Naturally, these impressions come with a lot of caveats. Since the game isn’t live yet these multiplayer impressions are based on specifically scheduled sessions with producers, developers, QA testers, and fellow members of the gaming press to run through the various game modes on several maps. I also supplemented that time by playing several rounds of each game mode against CPU opponents as well.
The issue here is that not only were my teammates and enemies not your typical gamers that are learning the game for the first time but also servers were relatively stable. I had issues connecting at first, but eventually, it worked itself out.
Game Modes Impressions
There are five game modes between Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Blast Radius, Mad Bomber, and Domination. The first four of those listed are all basically just some variation on deathmatch with a twist of some kind, so the variety isn’t actually as great as it seems on first glance.
For example, Mad Bomber is very similar to Deathmatch other than the fact that each player also has a timed explosive they can plant wherever they want. You get bonus points for explosive kills and disarming other explosives. In the end, it boils down to just being Deathmatch with a few sporadic extra kills here and there.
It’s really a shame that a WWII-era shooter is launching without a Capture the Flag mode or something that really takes advantage of the unique advantages VR presents. Something that incorporates some vehicles in some way would have been awesome, or at the very least another objective-based mode instead of four variations off of Deathmatch.
Weapons Impressions
The weapon selection is also shallow in the same way. There are only eight primary guns to pick from and weapons like the MP40 and M1A1 feel very similar in practice and two of the options are literally the exact same gun, except one of the options has a scope and the other doesn’t. Since there are zero sidearms in multiplayer and no progression system to speak of it just left a lot to be desired for me in terms of depth and options.
Luckily the ten large, spacious maps are fantastic. It’s extremely evident that this is a studio that has years and years of experience designing online multiplayer shooters so the map design philosophies really carry across well into a made-for-VR title like this. I feel like all-too-often VR shooter maps lack verticality and they all kind of feel the same, but that’s not the case here. There’s a snowy map with a light hazy fog effect in the air which pairs well with the stark white landscape — it’s a great juxtaposition for the ruined suburban church with exploded walls and destroyed interiors.
Overall ten entirely unique maps is a really great launching off point for this type of shooter and should keep things fresh for a while across all of the game modes.
Overall, I had a lot of fun playing multiplayer. In many ways it feels true to the tone and pacing of the original Medal of Honor games, specifically in terms of the fast-paced structure that focuses on delivering fun thrills without much complexity or depth. After a few hours it left me yearning for more in some ways, but it does scratch a certain itch that nothing on the market really does right now — not even Onward, Pavlov, Contractors, or any others that I’ve tried — due in large part to the nostalgia I feel for the brand and the setting.
The biggest hindrance overall is the lack of any sense of overarching progression. The fact that EA and Respawn have managed to capture that old-school feeling in the moment-to-moment gameplay and base WWII setting is a great achievement, but I also fear they may have turned the clock back in other ways too much as well. You don’t have a rank that levels up, there are no unlockables at all besides character skins — which are earned via campaign progress — and every gun is available from the start with zero changes possible. You can’t tweak your loadout or even change weapon skins.
As much as I enjoy the gameplay on a surface level, it doesn’t seem to go very far beyond the window dressing from what I’ve seen so far.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond releases on December 11th as a PC VR-exclusive on both the Oculus Home store and SteamVR with support officially listed for Rift, Vive, and Index.
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we want to know what has you the most excited in the VR space right now?
Now that we are comfortably on the other side of Half-Life: Alyx, Valve’s marquee multi-year AAA project built from the ground up for VR headsets, it’s important to keep looking forward.
There is a lot to get excited about still coming in 2020 and especially beyond. There are still major releases slated for this year from Facebook for the Oculus Rift platform, like Lone Echo 2, Phantom: Covert Ops, and Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. On Quest it seems like something new and exciting happens once or twice a month that we never expected, not to mention anticipated games like Onward, Solaris, and Population One.
Outside of the Facebook sphere we’ve got Dreams and Iron Man VR to look forward to on PSVR and plenty else on the horizon like LOW-FI, After the Fall, and another Walking Dead VR game, among many others.
So, there is a lot to look forward to then. What has you most excited in VR, AR, and otherwise in 2020 and beyond? Let us know down in the comments beow!
Jaunt and Land Rover have released a 360-degree film ahead of the America’s Cup Qualifiers on Friday 26th bringing customers and fans closer to the action of this famous boat race.
The film allows viewers to jump on board as the team sail around Bermuda’s Great Sound during final preparations for the challenge. Fans are transported into a grueling gym session, dunked underwater as the 2 ½ tonne racing machine flies over head at over 50 knots and taken on a drive in the all-new Land Rover Discovery.
Shot on specialist cameras, including Jaunt ONE, the film Above and Beyond uses a combination of 360-degree video techniques to place viewers right into the Land Rover BAR team as they look to take home the prestigious title in 2017.
Mark Cameron, Jaguar Land Rover Experiential Marketing Director said in a statement: “We constantly strive to create stand-out experiences for our customers through our partnerships, and by using Jaunt’s cutting edge VR technology, we are able togive the user unprecedented access to the team and America’s Cup Sailing in a thrilling first-hand experience.”
“This collaboration with Land Rover is a flagship project for us and one we’ve been excited about since we saw the early cuts of the film,” said Dominic Collins, General Manager International, Jaunt Inc. “What has been achieved sets Land Rover and Land Rover BAR apart when it comes to creating an immersive, cinematic experience of extreme sports. VR continues to play a huge part in the future of technology and brands everywhere are looking to stand out from the crowd by creating the most compelling experiences for their audiences – this one does exactly that.”
Checkout the video below or download via the Jaunt VR App, which supports iOS, Android, Samsung Gear VR, PlayStation VR, Google Daydream, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and major desktop browsers.
For the latest announcements from Jaunt, keep reading VRFocus.
