Crossing Spec Ops: The Line
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
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Getting people like you so butthurt that you post furiously about how other people should "Stop liking what I don't like!" while most others who've played the game got something out of it?SpiderJerusalem said:
I'd say that counts for excellent design.
Damn straight i wanted a winning option.draythefingerless said:
Because Walker *is* Rambo. You go through the game killing bases worth of troops before that scene, and bases worth of troops after that scene. What makes that particular base so special that it pulls the infinite respawn, you cant win trick? Even if it was hard as hell to win it conventionally I would still make it satisfying to do it.
I died 4 times that scene. Three from the infinite respawning snipers. Once from that last humvee because i realized there was that bunch of civilians nearby and wasted time trying to splash the humvee to death without hitting the civies. On the 5th time i sighed, and hit the humvee square in the center, watching the phosphorous round explode in a radius at least twice as large as all the ones before it.
There were too many changes of the rules for that scene to have the effect of making me feel guilty.
The one decision i made i somewhat regretted later was playing along with "Konrad" and shooting one of the prisoners(I chose the murderous soldier). I thought refusing would lead to another unwinnable situation like the phosphorous scene.
Why is everyone so fixated on the white phosphorus scene? Pretty much the entire game consists of nothing but Walker doing the opposite of what I would do in any given situation. Why is it so terrible that he does it there?SpiderJerusalem said:
I felt no personal guilt for what happened, but that doesn't mean I can't understand and identify with Walker's guilt, and I think that scene and really the entire game work quite well that way. Maybe it helps that this is the first modern-day shooter I've ever played, since I find the general concept quite distasteful, but yeah, this game really, really got to me.
I think it is important to make the distinction between player and protagonist agency, especially in games like Spec Ops. I never felt as if I was making the choice to fire the white phosphorous, but I rather considered it a decision on the part of the protagonist. Then I fired away with it gleefully (even though I did catch on once I saw the huge blob unarmed, unmoving people by the end of the bombing run) and accepted the resulting slow walk of guilt scene as something that was affecting the protagonist, not me as the player. Meanwhile, I also thought it had a second layer of "meaning" as a deconstruction of similar scenes in other military FPS-games where the resulting horror is rarely, if ever, shown and the whole use of WP/AC-130/Artillery/Whatever is meant to make the player go "wow, this is awesome".
To me it would seem as if most of the critique against Spec Ops in this thread stems from a confusion of player and protagonist agency. For this sort of game to work, one need to keep them very distinct and I honestly think that Spec Ops did make it clear that it was Walker's fault that the civilians got slaughtered, not the players. After all the main plot of the game is about Walker's descent into madness due to his own guilt, while the subtext is a deconstruction of modern FPS-games and their gung-ho approach to war. I think the game handles both quite well.
To me it would seem as if most of the critique against Spec Ops in this thread stems from a confusion of player and protagonist agency. For this sort of game to work, one need to keep them very distinct and I honestly think that Spec Ops did make it clear that it was Walker's fault that the civilians got slaughtered, not the players. After all the main plot of the game is about Walker's descent into madness due to his own guilt, while the subtext is a deconstruction of modern FPS-games and their gung-ho approach to war. I think the game handles both quite well.
You are wrong.RapeisGenocide said:
If you take your hands off the trigger finger for a second you realize that large group of people, which are the civilians, are just wandering aimlessly about and NOT moving in anywhere near the same frantic, aggressive fashion that the troops you are attacking are. Their movement(or lack of) gave them away as non-combatants.
Well, I'm sorry you kinda ruined the game for yourself, Spidey. Trope catching will do that.
Video games in general, and shooters in particular, don't really stand to close scrutiny and bullshit can be called from any angle on whatever the you like. While you noticed the signs of what's to come(as did i to be honest), the vast majority of players, along for the ride and poppin' dat phosphorous going 'whee', didn't. And that's exactly who the scene was for.
For a game like this, to me, the ultimate question is, was it a good(if not necessarily fun) ride? And I'd say, yes, they certainly did a better job then most of the shooters I can think of.
Video games in general, and shooters in particular, don't really stand to close scrutiny and bullshit can be called from any angle on whatever the you like. While you noticed the signs of what's to come(as did i to be honest), the vast majority of players, along for the ride and poppin' dat phosphorous going 'whee', didn't. And that's exactly who the scene was for.
For a game like this, to me, the ultimate question is, was it a good(if not necessarily fun) ride? And I'd say, yes, they certainly did a better job then most of the shooters I can think of.
I agree entirely. The entirety of the game does send a message of "you're fucked" pretty solidly throughout, but there would have been an interesting moral issue with letting these civilians die and saving more. Hell, the character work could have had fun with it. One of the greatest parts of the game is watching your squad deal with what's happening, seeing them wrestle with the morality of "sacrifice the few for the many" would have been entertaining.Ian Kapsthan Frost said:
Not that watching them deal with everything else in the game wasn't entertaining enough. Just one of those things that could have made a minor tweak in the game that would have changed the experience considerably.
sigh....there was a time where gamers werent such babies and actually had to use suspension of disbelief and imagination....oh woe is me.striker_002 said:
My apologies for quoting you so long after you actually made the post, but I gotta ask: how the hell is that possible? I have only played the demo but over the course of that the "stereotypical insurgents" first started shooting me without being provoked, and then in the next scene they were torturing and executing prisoners, so how are they "good guys" if all they are doing is at best committing slightly fewer atrocities than you?erttheking said:
OT: So spec-ops devs, I'm a monster for playing shooters and I should feel bad? well I guess i'll just do the heroic thing and not buy your pretentious wank.
Because the "insurgents" turn out to be the survivors of Dubai and they are fighting the remains of the US evacuation force (the 33rd Batallion) because the 33rd has instituted a tyrannical oppression on the survivors. The entire game likes to point out how shitty war is and this is just another part of that message.major_chaos said:
Gamespot did a spoiler podcast with the lead writer of Spec Ops: http://au.gamespot.com/features/gamespot-gameplay-special-edition-spoilercast-spec-ops-the-line-6386587/
I highly recommend anyone who played and finished the game give it a listen. He doesn't hold back revealing all kinds of things most people wouldn't have realized or thought of while playing the game. His perspective on the things they did and the gaming medium in general is very interesting.
I highly recommend anyone who played and finished the game give it a listen. He doesn't hold back revealing all kinds of things most people wouldn't have realized or thought of while playing the game. His perspective on the things they did and the gaming medium in general is very interesting.
You're not supposed to feel guilty, you "STOP LIKING IT, STOP LIKING IT RIGHT NOW" folks are taking it the wrong way.
Was I the only one a little frustrated how often I died? I'd never been more upset about a military shooter in my life.
And did anyone else get the painting of the mother and a slow playing twinkle twinkle little star instead of the normal loading screens?
Was I the only one a little frustrated how often I died? I'd never been more upset about a military shooter in my life.
And did anyone else get the painting of the mother and a slow playing twinkle twinkle little star instead of the normal loading screens?
Because you only fight them for the first few levels. It turns out that the 33rd turned on itself and went to civil war. The side that one imposed brutal martial law on the survivors of dubai and strung up the corpses of civilians and those they beat in the civil war alike. They also use brutal tactics to keep them in line, including bombing them with white phosphorus. The insurgents only attack you because they think you're with them and it doesn't really help that you go out of your way to help a 33rd squad that they managed to pin down.major_chaos said:
No, you should feel bad for what you do while playing this shooter. I'm not going to feel guilty for all my years of playing Halo, this game just takes shooters and portrays them in a different light.
I went into Spec Ops completely blind because I knew it would be story driven. It wasn't long before the now infamous mortar scene, where it had become pretty clear that the tone was going to get very dark.Gethsemani said:
Still, I played that scene out like any other Modern Warfare game (though, I certainly noted the reflection in the monitor) where I engaged the targets that I was presented with because I wanted to progress to the next stage. I knew as I targeted further up the encampment that there was a large concentration of people near an 'enemy' vehicle, and many of their silhouettes were indistinct in the heat of battle. Still, my task was pretty clear up to that point and I proceeded to rain death upon those hapless folks.
As I was surveying the dead civilian bodies, I became very much aware of the many realities of war that modern games, and other forms of pop-culture media conveniently make a habit of side-stepping.
Powerful stuff, and it's one of the best examples of good story-telling in a video game to date. I could easily write a lengthy essay on it, because I found Spec Ops jam packed with meaning (in a good, but sobering way).
This was pretty much my thought exactly. Once I saw the distinctly unarmed heat signature in the trench I was like "Are those civilians?", pondered dropping a round on them too just to be safe (which I think says something scary about me) but quickly decided to just focus on the vehicle that was highlighted as a target. The following walk through the camp and trench was firmly a "walk of shame" for Walker to me, but it also made me reflect on the state of modern FPS games and war in general and what kind of terrible weapons are actually used in modern conflicts.Still Life said:
I like to think myself as pretty good at reading plots, as an example I had Shutter Island figured out about halfway through, but it wasn't until I entered the last chapter that I realized that Walker had been an unreliable narrator for most of the game. The way they build up his "insanity" is pretty subtle and they made a terrific job of showing the slowly disintegrating cohesion of the squad as they are put under more and more pressure (and a lot of Lugos and Adams animosity makes a lot more sense when you consider that their CO is actually turning psychotic right before their eyes while they are trapped inside a hostile city without no way out).
Yes, I totally agree with your assessment that Spec Ops contains some high quality storytelling. Not only because it manages to weave a powerful main storyline, but also because it handles its' subtext and theme very, very well. Hopefully it will sell well enough that the studio will be allowed to make another game, because I am looking forward to seeing what they can do next.
Yathzee, Ebert doesn't give a fuck and even if he does and play THIS game in particular it wont be as effective as you said it is. UNLESS, he has played video games to the point that he knows the tropes and cliques that entail them or at least can enjoy the idea of games to the point that the dehumanizing element is overshadowed by the fun.
Let me put it this way, remember The Stanley Parable? the reason of WHY its so awesome is because it deconstructs the tropes that developers use to force the players INTO a single linear path to make sure they don't ruin their carefully crafted story. Tropes that a GAMER could understand by experiencing this phenomena before hand.
Roger isn't going to be affected by:
"Not the gore, not the darkness in Walker, but the darkness in me" unless there is already a preconception of what to expect in a genre that uses a lazy story to justify the mindless killing of "opposing forces" for fun and profit.
Let me put it this way, remember The Stanley Parable? the reason of WHY its so awesome is because it deconstructs the tropes that developers use to force the players INTO a single linear path to make sure they don't ruin their carefully crafted story. Tropes that a GAMER could understand by experiencing this phenomena before hand.
Roger isn't going to be affected by:
"Not the gore, not the darkness in Walker, but the darkness in me" unless there is already a preconception of what to expect in a genre that uses a lazy story to justify the mindless killing of "opposing forces" for fun and profit.