Video: Honor and family, not just guns and gore, power Medal of Honor Warfighter

It starts not with an explosion, or a bullet, or violence of any kind, but with a woman's voice; a worried voice; a wife's voice.

Medal of Honor Warfighter is a game of modern warfare told against a backdrop of globe-trotting terrorism. But when presenting this military shooter to a roomful of game journalists, developers Danger Close chose to lead not with the bombastic action that marks the norm among shooters, but instead with an argument between a soldier and worried wife.

That brief conversation, about the apprehension of loss, the balance of duty to one's country and one's family, is a telling reminder of a promise that the studio made when they unveiled the game.

Warfighter, they said, wouldn't be a game just about the specialized Tier 1 operators who fight terrorism abroad, but about the families they leave behind. Vox Games caught up with producer Greg Goodrich to chat with him about the coming game's unusual exploration of military families. We also chatted a bit about the game's multiplayer. One multiplayer mode of Warfighter has Tier 1 Operators from around the world taking each other on in online combat. We asked Goodrich whether the experiences of 2010's Medal of Honor reboot helped shape the game's good-guy versus good-guy multiplayer mode.

It didn't, Goodrich tells us, certainly not the controversy they ran into with their original decision to make that 2010 game playable online as a Taliban or subsequent decision to remove that choice. Besides, he tells us, this is just one of many very different sorts of online modes the game, due out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in October, will include.