How to Install Medal of Honor: Breakthrough and Join a Server

Breakthrough is the Medal of Honor expansion where dying does not take you out of the round. It puts you in a cage, and somebody on your team has to walk across the map and let you out.

That mode is called Liberation, it arrived with this expansion, and it is the single best reason to go looking for a Breakthrough server rather than a server for one of its siblings. A team that loses four people early is not merely down four people. It has four people sitting in a pen, watching, and a decision to make about whether to spend somebody else on a rescue.

Listings for it collect on the game's hub, which is where community servers for it appear.

First, work out which game you actually have

This is the part that causes more failed joins than any technical problem, so it comes before everything else.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is a family of three related products rather than one game with patches:

• Allied Assault is the 2002 original — the Normandy landing, the sniper town, the Quake III engine underneath it all. Its own servers are listed separately.
• Spearhead is the first expansion, moving the war forward through later campaigns and adding its own multiplayer content.
• Breakthrough is the second, and the one this guide is about: North Africa and Italy, and the Liberation mode.

They share an engine and a great deal of code, and they are not interchangeable online. A Breakthrough server needs a Breakthrough client. Spearhead servers need Spearhead. Somebody who installed one of the three and cannot see why the address they were given does nothing has almost always installed a different one.

The expansions have been sold bundled together more often than separately, so there is a fair chance that whoever owns one owns all three. Check the library entry rather than assuming, and check which executable a shortcut is actually pointing at.

The site lists several Medal of Honor titles and they are different populations, not different names for the same one.

What Breakthrough is about

The base game is Normandy and the western push. Breakthrough goes somewhere the series had skipped: the North African campaign, and then the slow, ugly Italian one that followed it.

That changes the look of the maps completely. Sand, low walls, Mediterranean towns and hill positions instead of hedgerows and French villages. The multiplayer maps that came with it inherit that geography, and the result plays differently — longer sightlines in the desert sections, tighter and more vertical in the Italian ones.

It is still a Quake III engine shooter from the early 2000s, which means it is fast, it is unforgiving about aim, and it has none of the modern comforts. There is no regenerating health. There is no sprint on a cooldown. Weapons kill quickly on both sides and the exchange usually goes to whoever saw the other first.

The modes

Alongside Liberation, the multiplayer carries the modes the family had already accumulated: straight deathmatch, team deathmatch, and objective rounds where one side is attacking something and the other is stopping them.

Liberation is the one people run servers for. The loop is simple and the strategy that grows out of it is not:

• You die, you are moved to your team's prison area.
• A teammate who reaches you sets you free.
• Freed players are back in the round immediately.
• The round ends when a team's players are all held, or the objective goes.

What that produces is a game about pressure rather than a game about kills. Killing four enemies is worth much less if one of their teammates can slip round and release all four. Servers running Liberation tend to have regulars who understand this and newcomers who do not, and the gap is visible within a round.

Getting hold of it

Honest section, because there is no clean answer.

These games are from the era of boxed retail and have had a complicated commercial life since. They have appeared on digital storefronts, disappeared, appeared again in bundles, and the situation is not the same in every region. Check the storefront you use rather than trusting an article that will be out of date within a year.

What this guide will not do is point you at an installer on an unfamiliar website. Old game files hosted by strangers are one of the most dependable ways to get something you did not ask for, and there is no version of "just download it here" that is good advice.

If you already own it, whether on disc or in a library, everything below applies.

The server browser problem

Every multiplayer game of this vintage had the same dependency and the same fate. The in-game browser did not maintain its own list of servers; it asked a central master server, run by GameSpy, which ones existed. GameSpy was switched off in 2014.

The immediate effect on games like this one was an empty browser and a widespread assumption that the game was dead. It was not dead. The servers were still running and still accepting connections; nothing was telling clients where they were.

Communities responded in two ways, and both are still how it works.

Replacement master servers. Volunteer-run lists that the game can be pointed at, restoring the browser to something like its original behaviour. Which one a given community uses is a property of that community, and their own instructions are the authority. There is no single universal answer here and a guide inventing one would be doing you harm.

Direct connection. Which is what the rest of this section is about, and which never stopped working.

Connecting by address

The engine underneath this game is id Tech 3, the same one that ran Quake III, and it inherits that engine's console. Everything below is standard for the family.

Open the console. On most builds of these games it is bound to the tilde key, and on some it needs enabling in the options menu first — if the key does nothing, that setting is where to look.

With the console open, the connect command takes an address:

connect 192.0.2.10:12345

Use the server's real address and port in place of that. Press enter and the client will attempt the connection, download anything the server sends, and drop you in.

Three things about that:

Copy the port. A host running four game servers on one machine cannot give them all the same port number, and the address without a port will find nothing. This causes more "the server is offline" reports than actual offline servers do.

Mind the leading slash. In this engine, commands typed in the console work as written. Typed into the in-game chat box they need a forward slash in front. If a command appears to do nothing, check which box you typed it into.

Save it. The browser has a favourites list, and for a game with a small population that list is the difference between having somewhere to play and concluding there is nothing on. Old-game servers fill at predictable hours and look abandoned the rest of the time.

Playing a Liberation round properly

Since Liberation is the reason to be here, it is worth spelling out how a good round differs from a bad one.

A bad round looks like deathmatch. Both teams push into the middle, trade kills, and whichever side happens to catch the last survivor wins. Nobody thinks about the prisoners because nobody has worked out that they are an asset.

A good round splits the team. Some players hold the line, and one or two peel off towards the enemy's prison area, because every rescue undoes several minutes of the other side's work. That creates a second front the enemy has to defend, which thins their attack, which is exactly what the mode is for.

Defending your own prison is the corresponding job and the one people forget. Leaving four captured enemies unguarded because the fighting is elsewhere is how a winning position evaporates in fifteen seconds.

The other habit worth building is silence discipline about your own position. When you are captured you can watch, and what you can see is worth telling your team. Servers vary on how they treat that, and the polite version is to ask what the regulars consider acceptable rather than assuming.

None of this is complicated. It is simply not what twenty years of respawn shooters have trained anybody to do, which is why the mode still surprises people.

Old game, modern machine

A handful of problems are universal to shooters of this age and none of them mean the game is broken.

It launches in a small window or a stretched image. These games assume a 4:3 display. Resolution and aspect ratio are configurable, and community patches for this family handle widescreen more thoroughly than the game's own options do.

The mouse feels wrong. Mouse handling predates the conventions every current game shares. Turning off acceleration at the operating system level is the first thing to try.

It will not start at all on a current version of Windows. Compatibility mode and running as administrator resolve a good share of it. The communities that maintain these games have documented the rest, because they have all hit it.

Sound is missing or crackling. Another artefact of the era, and another thing community patches address.

The server rejects you on join. Version mismatch first, wrong expansion second, full server third. In that order.

Why bother, and where else to look

An honest answer: because a small, well-run server on an old shooter is a better evening than a large anonymous one on a new shooter, and because Liberation is a mode nobody has copied properly since.

An equally honest caveat: the population is small. Servers for games in this family cluster in particular countries and fill at particular hours. If you are somewhere with no local community, you will be playing at high ping or not playing.

The neighbouring games are all in the same situation and several of them are livelier. Return to Castle Wolfenstein came out of the same year and the same engine family, and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory — its free multiplayer descendant — kept more of its population than almost any shooter of that era. Day of Defeat is the Half-Life side of the same idea and is still busy. Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2 took this genre commercial and both still have community servers.

If the appeal is the war rather than the engine, Red Orchestra: Ostfront went considerably harder on realism, and Battlefield 1942 went considerably wider on scale.

For any of them, the same two habits apply: check that a listing is measured rather than claimed — our writeup on trustworthy server listings explains what to look for — and favourite the servers you like, because in this corner of the hobby a server you cannot find again is a server you have lost.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Medal of Honor: Breakthrough servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.