Cover System

Lore & Background

In the 2010 Medal of Honor, the player follows a small squad of U.S. Army soldiers through the War in Afghanistan. The cover system mirrors how these men actually fought: hugging a crumbling wall in a mountain village, ducking behind a stacked sandbag line in a forward operating base, or using the lip of a trench to pop up and suppress an enemy machine-gunner before sliding back down. Every engagement is a rhythm of exposure and concealment, and the game rewards players who respect that rhythm.

Above and Beyond (2020) revisits the same principle through the eyes of a member of the OSS operating across multiple European theaters. The cover objects are slightly more varied—barricaded doorways, overturned vehicles, church pews—and the system is tuned to feel more fluid, but the underlying fiction is identical: a soldier in the open is a soldier about to die, and the world is full of things you can hide behind if you know where to look.

Across both entries the cover system is not a separate mode or toggle; it is woven into level design. Corridors are narrow, chokepoints are deliberate, and the geometry of a room is built so that the player's natural movement path runs along coverable edges. The mechanic is therefore less a feature you activate and more the default grammar of the combat space.

Reader's Guide

The Cover System is the structured, object-based concealment mechanic that became the backbone of Medal of Honor's combat, most fully realized in the 2010 entry (EA Los Angeles) and refined in Above and Beyond (2020).

In practice, the player walks up to any coverable object—a wall, a sandbag stack, a crate, a vehicle hull—and the character automatically crouches and presses against it, breaking the enemy's line of sight. From that position you can peek left or right to scan for threats, strafe along the object to change your angle, and fire with reduced exposure. Releasing cover lets you sprint to the next object. Allies in the 2010 title also use cover, calling out enemy positions and suppressing fire while you reposition.

What makes it distinct to Medal of Honor, versus say Gears of War or Call of Duty, is the era and the pacing. WWII small arms have slower rates of fire and less magazine capacity, so the cover rhythm is longer, more deliberate, and more punishing if you pop up carelessly. The design intent is to make the player feel the vulnerability of a single rifleman in an open field and the relief of a wall between you and the next burst.

The player experience is a slow, tense metronome: move, hide, observe, fire, hide again. It turns every firefight into a series of small decisions about when to spend your exposure, which is a fundamentally different feel from the constant sprint-and-spray of many modern FPS titles.