Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond (2020) was set to be the storied franchise’s first big push into virtual reality when it launched in late 2020, offering up some of its characteristic WWII combat missions alongside what hoped to be a robust online multiplayer. Now, less than three years since launch, EA’s Respawn Entertainment say they’re pulling the plug on multiplayer.
Arguably the best part of Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond was its online multiplayer, but that’s going to change before year’s end. The developers quietly posted this message on the game’s Quest page, appended above its original description:
“Multiplayer will be unavailable starting on December 1, 2023.”
The studio hasn’t provided any reasoning beyond the short message, although it’s fairly clear why the developers don’t want to pay for server space anymore. The well-funded and much hyped Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond suffered a pretty rocky launch, and never managed to gain the sort of sustained support either the developer Respawn Entertainment or Meta’s in-house publisher Oculus Studios were aiming for.
Originally released on the Oculus PC platform and SteamVR headsets back in December 2020, EA’s Respawn Entertainment was hoping to make a splash with its first VR-exclusive entry into the franchise, having worked on the WWII shooter for three years before launch. At $60 on PC VR when it first released, requiring a massive 180GB to install, expectations were set for what promised to be a true ‘AAA’ VR shooter. Alas, the game suffered from a host of issues at launch, which ranged from usability to gameplay polish, essentially rendering it a costly flop.
Still, Respawn and Meta (then Facebook) pushed through the game’s middling launch on PC VR by slimming down the game to fit on Quest 2, offering up its eight-hour campaign and online multiplayer to a wider audience a year after it launched on Rift and Steam. In an effort to win back good will, the studio even reduced the price to $40 and slimmed down the file size on Quest to fit on the headset’s 64GB variant.
That said, you probably still won’t see a lot of love for Medal of Honor: Above andBeyond—certainly not on the scale of the now dearly departed Echo VR, Meta’s own VR sports game which was shuttered earlier this month. Medal of Honor VR’s last update was in late 2021, basically showing the studio abandoned the game long before it decided to shut down servers just short of its three-year anniversary since launch.
While this isn’t the first MoH title to see the axe, it is the youngest among the group. EA deprecated online support for a number of MoH titles in February 2023, including Medal of Honor (2010), Medal of Honor: Warfighter (2012) and Medal of Honor: Airborne (2007)—all of which benefitted from wide support across PC, Xbox and PS consoles throughout their tenure.
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Respawn Entertainment and Oculus are taking the PC VR game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond (2020) and slimming it down to fit on Oculus Quest 2 for launch later this year. Make sure to clear out plenty of space though, as the game is slated to take up a around “40-45GB,” the developer says.
Update (October 1st, 2021): Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is said to take up between 40-45GB, which is coming in fairly tight to the 64GB variant’s usable space of 50GB, the remainder of which is used for the OS and system apps.
If you already own Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond via the Oculus Store (re: not the Steam version), you can count on being able to play the game for free on Quest 2 when it launches, Oculus Studios Executive Producer Michael Doran confirmed on Reddit.
Doran further confirmed that it will be coming in a bit cheaper than its original $60 launch price on Rift/SteamVR, and will be priced at $40 when it launches on Quest 2 later this year. The original article announcing the exclusive Quest 2 port follows below:
Original Article (September 29th, 2021): Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond launched on the Oculus PC platform and SteamVR headsets back in December 2020, bringing the storied franchise to VR for the first time.
The Oculus Quest 2 version is said to include the full Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond single player campaign, multiplayer mode, and the living history of The Gallery, a set of live-action documentary shorts featuring WWII vets.
Image courtesy Respawn Entertainment
Out of the games partnered with Oculus Studios, Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond didn’t fare very well out of the gate, having initially garnered middling reviews for a Metacritic score of 67/100. A few months after launch, it still ranked among the worst-rated games when we stacked up the top 25 ‘big bet’ games supported by the company.
In our review [5/10], we noted that Medal of Honor featured a competent multiplayer mode, although its core gameplay pillars and polish were decidedly lacking. Polish to the PC VR version has improved to some degree with subsequent updates, garnering a ‘Mostly Positive’ recent rating on Steam, however the consensus from over 1,400 user reviews leaves it with an overall ‘Mixed’ user rating.
The launch of Medal of Honor exclusively on Quest 2 continues a slow trend of developers pulling back from supporting the original Quest headset, with Resident Evil 4 arriving in October as one of the most prominent Quest 2 exclusives to hit the Oculus Store.
We’re also hoping Respawn has reconsidered Medal of Honor’s $60 price tag. If not, that would make it one of the most expensive games on the platform, coming in at $20 more than the universally-acclaimed The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners (2020).
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