For some reason I got way more into Medal of Honor: Airborne than I should've. The cutscenes were a pretty good effort for their time, and this shit is a clear precursor to the mega AAA CoD stuff we're so accustomed to now. Were the old CoD games this cinematic? Maybe this game is emulating that? Who knows lol.
The maps are really good in this game. There's a bunch of objectives but you get airdropped back in every time you die so you can try and land closer or on things to get an advantage over the baddies. The first few missions are general multiplayer game feeling maps, but the last level holy shit. Its basically a massive maze like fortress you can land anywhere on and get exploring/killing. Feels like a Zelda dungeon almost. Maybe I've just been playing bad/old games for too long lol. Its definitely really cool and inventive mission design for this style of game.
Anyhow the game is surprisingly good despite the dated mechanics.
Are you playing this on a console?
Anyway,
Call of Duty's developers were a group that split off of the
Medal of Honor PC developers,
Medal of Honor was the franchise that originally began the cinematic EVENT moments in military FPSes. The PS1 games actually did some of this but were technologically limited. The PC game
Allied Assault did the D-Day landings in a scale that's still sorta impressive today. The PS2/Xbox generation of console games essentially tried to rip this off but they weren't ever powerful enough or the devs weren't good enough to pull it off as well as the PC versions. Meanwhile the AA devs split and went to produce the Vietnam set
Men of Honor (which is underrated, especially for the fact that they hid random Vietcong traps in the jungles of the levels so you could die suddenly and horribly and had you questionably attack villages) or
Call of Duty (then 2 and then 4: MW which basically became the CoD linear path to EVENTS we know and love) while EALA produced
Pacific Assault for the PC which post-titles opens with you experiencing the attack on Pearl Harbor and further Pacific set major events such as Okinawa and Guadalcanal, I forget which is the opener D-Day equivalent that you storm the beaches of and get pinned down and shot SO YOU FLASHBACK.
When the 360/PS3 came around they no longer needed to produce inferior console versions, they could upgrade them to the PC standard.
Airborne started out on an iteration of Criterion's Black engine but they realized it wasn't going to work and restarted development in UE3, possibly multiple times. By the time they got the game out not only was WWII FPS excitement dying down but the game played more like the earlier titles and did not fully take into account some of the more realistic importations the genre had picked up like iron sights.
All that history said, the original idea was conceived off of a
Allied Assault expansion mission (which I think the producers/designers were involved in, as they didn't folllow 2015) in which you did the paratrooper drop (with like three spots you could land at) and fought your way to other soldiers. (Band of Brothers did an episode like this I think.) Their goal was to recreate many of those paratrooper drops, but also have an AI and objective system in which you could land literally anywhere and tackle objectives, this of course limited the size of the maps as you note, and also made some areas instant death drops while others will put you nearer to squads who can assist. The AI was also supposed to take into account the maps and react accordingly to it. (In the multiplayer this is actually preserved, if you're on the Allies, you drop, I think invincible until you hit the ground so you can't get gunned out of the air. If you're on Axis, you spawn on the ground at one of their defensive spots.) It works better on some maps than others.
At one time, early early in development, I think it's mentioned in the
Game Informer preview where all the screenshots are prerenders not even from the then engine because it was like three years before the game eventually came out. They were going to have missions where you play a guy on the ground of some sort like say a French Resistance dude (or lady? keeping with the franchise's past), in generally stealth-like missions to "setup" the level for the drop. And then depending on what you accomplished with him, it'd change what you experienced post-drop. Like say taking out a gun emplacement, or taking out some search lights, or even things like putting more supplies around the map. But you'd basically only have a side arm and die easily if caught so you couldn't wipe out everyone pre-drop or anything like that.
I remember people on NeoGAF and elsewhere not believing the Final Mission, including reviewers, who thought it was totally made up. But no, the Nazi's did build those fuckers:
I have a fondness for
Airborne and the 2010 short lived reboot game as they did seem very different in tone than where CoD went despite CoD's premise being the whole YOU'RE PART OF A SQUAD, NOT A HERO.
Warfighter gets nuts trying to chase Call of Duty rather than holding to a semi-realism (but not hardcore like ARMA or something) the PC versions of the MoH games always seemed to, for their time, although the typhoon and flooding of the city in the Philippines is one of those sections I wish was in a better game. If only because more AI enemies died not understanding the level was flooding and dangerous to everyone than I killed and I still have no idea if that was intentional or broken.
I ask about consoles because I've been wondering if the PC version has got a fix around for Windows 10 out yet. Game is one of those that has the stupid "check" for a newer Windows version than 98 or ME, which apparently 8+ are not. Maybe there's a crack for this like Crysis has. I suppose I could find out for myself. IIRC, Airborne was one of the first DX10 games so it got shitty performance reviews when it came out.