Spec Ops: The Line. A Shooter Propelde By Story Rather Than Gameplay?

[Vault101]

I don;t often play miltiary shooters (for obvious reasons) but this certainyl got my interest...and I like 3rd person shooters

 

[trooper6]

It seems like a fascinating story and I was really interested in it...but then I heard that the single player campaign was 4-5hours long. I'm not paying $60 for a 4-5 hour game. Yeah, I know there is multiplayer, but I don't really play multiplayer.

So...yeah, I'll wait until I can get it really cheaply.

It's a bit longer than that. Steam didn't record my play time properly, but the Kotaku reviewer said it took him about 7 hours. And as I linked earlier it's half-off on Amazon right now. And from what I've heard the multiplayer isn't very good. It's really something you should buy for the single-player.

Despite the fact that this is the Escapist, I'm not a member of the PC master race. Additionally, I don't like Steam because you don't actually own your games and from what I've heard if you upset the powers that be, you can get your account banned and then you can no longer access the games you bought. So, I prefer to stick with my 360. And the 360 version is still too expensive.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

That's basically saying that videogames aren't serious yet.

To me it has nothing to do with being not serious as a medium in general, it`s like this useless art discussion. It`s not about the story itself, it`s about a good mix between gameplay, story, presentation and most important entertainment.
I still like Star Wars and i can still watch Q.Tarantino movies and have fun with it, others don`t, this is no point, just a matter of personal taste.

I guess it all comes down what you expect from a game. Games aren`t movies and i`m glad about it. If you just comparing it with already seen/read stories from movies/books
you´re ruining your own fun. I`d rather experience a story like this than the usual modern war crap (cod, bf,etc). If you look at the storylines most shooter have i would call this "breakthrough" or hopefully a good start.

 

[ElPatron]

I`d rather experience a story like this than the usual modern war crap (cod, bf,etc)

The problem is that CoD4 had the best story I could have expected from that shooter. Nameless arab country? Stolen Russian nukes? I have seen that movie, I have read that book. However it mixed up everything really nice and justified every level I played.

Just like Star Wars. The space combat was completely ripped off from a WWII movie, but I didn't care. What about Harry Potter? Troll much? George Lucas and J.K. Rowling ripped off so much and combined it so well that it became a staple of their genre. It's almost like a tribute.

But sitting in front of my PC and thinking to myself that I have seen that story before is the same thing as when it happens when I am reading a book or watching a movie.

That wouldn't be too serious if the gameplay interested me. But since the thread is about how the story "propels" the game I have to say if the gameplay doesn't interest me it better have a great story.

I don;t often play miltiary shooters (for obvious reasons)

You're saying that like if it was widely known that military shooters cause cancer.

In other words: it's not that obvious what you are trying to say.

 

[Loonyyy]

No, not slightly.

A pale shadow of a shadow of the original Heart of Darkness. It robs bits and pieces from both, trying to imitate the sombre tone and mood of the book, the overt viciousness of the film (towards the end), the philosophical aspects of the French plantation scenes from the Director's Cut, the colonialist criticisms of Konrad's original work and then tries to play it off as a generic pipe-shooter.

It's the laziest kind of attempt at trying to pose as a smart, edgy story, when all it does is takes the best bits from far superior sources, doesn't credit them and adds only unnecessary twists that create more plot holes and contrivances than they should.

This. I finished the demo, and was instantly not impressed. I'd heard of all the "Trying to adapt Heart of Darkness as a videogame" talk, and, as a fan of (Though, by no means any sort of expert on, it's an amazingly complex book, Heart of Darkness, I thought I'd check it out.)

Firstly, the characters are a terrible representation of the military: I mean, seriously, at least look up what body armour looks like on a man before you put in this protagonist wearing what seems to be paper thin nonsense. The concept of sending in a 3-man "Delta team" (No, special forces does not mean what you think it does Game devs. Think "All Gillied up" rather than every other level in Modern Warfare). Then I get to the gameplay: Magical 1-button does everything, ridiculous contextualisation, and the levels are utterly linear (Like, depressingly so. It's a corridor shooter out in a desert. Yeah, really) The Unreal 3, as you'd expect, looks utterly dated.

My first encounter with enemies (Outside of a turret section on a helicopter (Entirely scripted, poorly animated, and just reinforcing the lack of reality of the situation [Before someone says: No, I don't think realism is a good thing, however, a certain level of maturity and reality is needed for the type of commentary they want: Firing a minigun during a rail section at scripted helicopters is not. It's fucking duck hunt.])) was a group of scavenger/survivor types. They don't speak English, so one squad member (Only one? In a mission into Dubai, without reinforcements? What the fuck?) converses in his native tongue. Rather than any choices, or any option apart from mindless violence, we shoot and kill all the survivors, then progress through more linear bullshit killing guys who've magically determined where we are, and now hide behind chest high walls waiting their turn. There's no sense of desperation, or that these guys have any motivation, you're just killing. You don't even have a pack of supplies they could concievably want to rob you of for christ's sake.

After brutally murdering the fuck out of everyone (And the finishing moves are entirely stupid. Seriously, the military doesn't act like this, and half of these things are non-lethal against deadly threats, with weapons, which we leave right next to them. It's just completely stolen curb stomps from GOW), we get to rescue some soldiers being held prisoner (There's no real reason they are, they just are).

Then onto a skip, (demo), we get to find out that a crazy hippy on the radio is actually ordering all the torture and murder (Which is bizarre and just plain silly, as presented in the game), kill some more enemies (Now military guys, who, bizarrely, have a tactic of running, unarmed but for a knife, up to you, letting you shoot the hell out of them), learning that there's some sort of CIA activity against the deserters. Riiight.

So onto more killing of dudes (Seriously, you kill relentlessly, it's just GOW gameplay non-stop, completely at odds with the themes of the story.)

That's about all I remember before the demo ends.

So, let me get this straight: Murdering hundreds of enemies, cutting through hordes of boring Serious Sam-esque archetypes who are meant to represent sympathetic or interesting characters, with your team of standard Special Forces stereotypes, for a mission that isn't clear, while observing a story about a military man who may have gone Konrad Krazy in the middle of a desert is meant to be the retelling of Heart of Darkness? No matter how dark of ruthless that the protagonist gets, that's not the point of the story, and the complete disconnect between story and gameplay just further demonstrates the soul-less adaptation it is.

It's a Dante's Inferno. It's pretending to be meaningful, rather than being meaningful, brings nothing new to the concept, dumbs down the concept, and then sells it with the generic UT3 Engine GOW clone. They want to be compared to Heart of Darkness, they want to seem clever without doing the work. They're hoping you've seen Apocalypse Now, and read HoD, so you'll fill in the gaps to assume the intent of the original work.

Homefront is more meaningful than this. Fuck, Bulletstorm had a better narrative and theme than this.

 

[Loonyyy]

Oops, double. CAPTCHAAAA!

 

[Loonyyy]

I just finished it this morning after playing for a few days on Suicide Mission difficulty. Honestly, Spec Ops has affected me more then any other game I have ever played. The moral, graphic decisions you are forced to make and your characters decent into madness make you feel horrible at times. The game play is bland but you play this game for the story.

Or you could just read Heart of Darkness and/or watch Apocalypse Now, which is the exact same story, only without the lousy Shyamalan-esque attempts at a twist and the poor dialog.

How about we play video games with great stories instead of insult them for not being an older medium then? This kind of thinking is freaking awful and should be noted for the sane fact that people who say this kind of stuff should just be ignored by video game makers overall. I would rather have an amazing story than a amazing journey of gameplay. Mainly for the fact that we would keep getting stuff like Gears of war instead of master pieces like Bioshock.

How about we praise game makers (like film makers) for crafting original, engaging stories instead of those who steal and rehash works from sources. Stuff like Bioshock, which features not a single original idea to it's name, or Spec Ops, which steals (or borrows, depending on who you ask) from Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, without originality or even putting a new spin on the material. They're essentially remakes of great stories, but without the audacity or the courage to truly stand out as worthy storytelling continuations.

Now, something like Uncharted, as corny, cheesy and by-the-adventure-genre-book it may be, they still were daring enough to take the story into new places, work with the mythology they had and craft new, interesting characters and plots. I regard them just as highly as I regard the Indiana Jones trilogy.

To be fair, while Bioshock is rehashing old ideas, it's doing so to express those ideas in the context of a game, rather than exploiting the source material. It's a commentary on Objectivism, rather than hoping you'll play it and think of Atlas Shrugged. I'd say that it's the right sort of adaptation.

Games have been imitating books, movies for ages you know from Tolkien to saving privare ryan, it's nothing new, picking more intellectual works such as "Heart of Darkness" can only mean story telling is getting more complex.

I'm still waiting for a game based of American Psycho :L

Using someone else's story isn't more complex. I'm waiting till we can make our own Heart of Darkness, not steal someone elses.

I'd say games like Portal and Bioshock start to get there, some like Farcry 2 try too hard, and fail, and that Bastion and Metro 2033 certainly have an interesting perspective that's worth considering.

GOW clones with references to classic literature won't get us there, not ever.

 

[Loonerinoes]

Having finished it, I will say this: The game's gameplay is fairly standard fare for FPSes these days, with one exception - it's pretty fucking hard!

That being said the gameplay being hard is good, because the difficulty adds to what this game's gameplay primary purpose really seems to be - Spec Ops: The Line's gameplay serves primarily to tell the story.

This is extremely apparent because the more and more you play the game, the less and less you feel like killing enemies "just for teh lulz." and more and more you wind up killing enemies "because the bastards fucking had it coming!"

Does that mean the gameplay is great? On its own merits...no. But it does mean that it has absolutely terrific synergy with the story of the game. Not to mention the art...GOD! No brown/grey shooter tropes here...colors aplenty in post-apocalypstick Dubai!

To conclude - DEFINITELY give this one a playthrough if you appreciate a good story. I can't say the characterization is phenomenal since I feel like the characters primarily serve the overall story and message of the game too rather than being their own persons, but it is solid regardless.

And to those saying this is just another samey boring military FPS or GOW knock-off or whatever...ugh...you have no clue how wrong you are. GOW's story is filled with all kinds of ideals and delusions - this game's story may start on such a familiar note, but the more you play it the more you realize that it is literally about having all these ideals and delusions being stripped to the bone until by the end the only thing left is the cold hard truth about war.

 

[Vault101]

I don;t often play miltiary shooters (for obvious reasons)

You're saying that like if it was widely known that military shooters cause cancer.

In other words: it's not that obvious what you are trying to say.

they do cause cancer don't they?

ok ok

1. military shooters are usually first person, I don't mind first person but it gets old...particually if its a military shooter

2. theres somthing about a modern military setting I find so....boring..so off putting..so dull, and I don;t know what it is...I mean if you replace the bad guys with aliens and add space to the marinesnames all of a sudden I'm interested..I'm just odd that way

3. shooters...usually militay shooters focus on multiplayer too much....lack of interesting story or single player...blah blah blah America woo! governemtn blah blah blah nuke

 

[Loonyyy]

Having finished it, I will say this: The game's gameplay is fairly standard fare for FPSes these days, with one exception - it's pretty fucking hard!

That being said the gameplay being hard is good, because the difficulty adds to what this game's gameplay primary purpose really seems to be - Spec Ops: The Line's gameplay serves primarily to tell the story.

This is extremely apparent because the more and more you play the game, the less and less you feel like killing enemies "just for teh lulz." and more and more you wind up killing enemies "because the bastards fucking had it coming!"

Does that mean the gameplay is great? On its own merits...no. But it does mean that it has absolutely terrific synergy with the story of the game. Not to mention the art...GOD! No brown/grey shooter tropes here...colors aplenty in post-apocalypstick Dubai!

To conclude - DEFINITELY give this one a playthrough if you appreciate a good story. I can't say the characterization is phenomenal since I feel like the characters primarily serve the overall story and message of the game too rather than being their own persons, but it is solid regardless.

And to those saying this is just another samey boring military FPS or GOW knock-off or whatever...ugh...you have no clue how wrong you are. GOW's story is filled with all kinds of ideals and delusions - this game's story may start on such a familiar note, but the more you play it the more you realize that it is literally about having all these ideals and delusions being stripped to the bone until by the end the only thing left is the cold hard truth about war.

If you're referring to me: I'm saying the gameplay is a GOW knockoff. Not the story. And that the GOW knockoff gameplay creates a disconnect between the story and the actions taken by the player.

 

[IBlackKiteI]

Holly Batman you people are being harsh.

Forget about it. Everytime a game does something different storywise a few guys will jump out of the bush to name movie examples doing it better, more meaningfull and being the original. I`m glad if we get more good book/movie ripoffs to play instead of the crap most action games call a story. Maybe it could be a start for good mature original stories in general gaming (especially shooter are in need of those).

So Spec Ops should automatically be praised just for being somewhat different, in that's it's grittier and edgier than most shooters? Nevermind the fact that it basically descends into a juvenile, convoluted mess rather than a truly gripping morally clouded descent into madness like the source material it aims to emulate?
If anything, this is the sort of mentality that's holding games back in the story department. Something unique isn't automatically better than something that isn't. Some of the worst stuff I've read, seen or heard are things that aim to be different for the sake of being different, and end up coming across as downright silly and incoherant. Trying to adhere too much to things already done is bad, but trying to be wholly original and innovative at the expense of actual quality is worse.
If you had a turd sandwich it'd be different, sure, but it'd still taste like crap.

Taking ideas from other sources for your own work can potentially be great, if done well.
For instance, just about every superhero and supervillain is derived from the same sort of basis, in particular the vast majority of them have extremely similar origins and motivations to the traditional superhero/supervillian archetypes. Yet many of them are still interesting figures and pop culture icons that people have been obsessed with for years. This is because they each add their own spin and concepts to the original premise whilst remaining intriguing, rather than attempting to copy it completely or, conversely, trying to put a much too different take on it and failing miserably.
The character of Max Payne is pretty much a cliche. In short, the game tells the story of a somewhat stereotypical down on his luck detective out to avenge the murder of his family, but fuses it with some very memorable encounters, characters and just the right amount of shady conspiracy and intrigue to make it unique and compelling whilst not going overboard. Bioshock reused a ton of already done ideas along with new ones to make one of the most immediately recognised and beloved worlds in gaming. The Void is a game that on the surface seems so alien to all others it may not even seem to have direct similarities to them, however it still makes good use of themes and concepts which have been a staple of storytelling for ages.
Spec Ops essentially just chops up works much better than it and uses the pieces in all the wrong ways way too often.

 

[General Twinkletoes]

I've played it for an hour or so. The story is one big WTF. So Dubai is destroyed by sand, a US army platoon has gone rogue, CIA is now hunting them and now your team has to fight EVERYONE: the Dubai citizens, the platoon and I guess the CIA as well.

Apocalypse Now? Heart of Darkness? More like MW3.

Besides we know they put the game in Dubai only so that the US teenagers can shoot more Arab people.

Except that you don't. You end up fighting americans just as much. This game grabs that obnoxious jingoistic attitude and then twists it around, in a very disturbing way.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

Just like Star Wars. The space combat was completely ripped off from a WWII movie, but I didn't care. What about Harry Potter? Troll much? George Lucas and J.K. Rowling ripped off so much and combined it so well that it became a staple of their genre. It's almost like a tribute.

But sitting in front of my PC and thinking to myself that I have seen that story before is the same thing as when it happens when I am reading a book or watching a movie.

I know what you mean but i still don`t get why you accept it with books/movies and not with games. Was the story in Spec Ops such a bad tribute? I have no reason to really defend it since i haven`t played the game. I`m just saying that i appreciate a different story telling since it usual doesn`t make much difference which modern war game i`m playing these days. I doubt that the upcomming Medal of Honor or COD:BO2 will be different from the other ones.

About COD:MW: I really liked the first but everything after that started to get a bit to crazy for my taste. After what they did with the MW2 story you`re right about the third. My personal problem was that i disliked MW2 so much (storywise) that i couldn´t really care about MW3. It felt to much like bad sience fiction. I only played it to see a bit of over the top war action and it delivered.

Edit1:

...

Since i haven`t played the game you could be right. Don`t know, from what i`ve heard i`m pretty sure i will like the story. You know that saying it is bad (or a turd sandwich, whatever) is just your personal opinion, right?
Even if i agree with you after playing it, i still stand to my point that every different take is good for todays shooter stories. Even if it`s for the sake of being different and not doing it well i´d say nice try, do it better next time. It`s still better to me than the usual stories of modern war games. In COD it doesn`t matter much which of them i play, even the last Medal of Honor, they feel the same and it`s gotten shallow.
You say this holds storytelling back? Something different than the usual rest? Sorry you lost me there. Even if SpecOps didn`t do it "right" for you, i still welcome different attempts for war game based story telling.

Can`t speak about Bioshock (wasn`t my game, it bored me) but Max Payne is still a exceptional franchise proving it`s not what you do, it`s how you do it. I`m loving all three of them (yes, even the Bruce Payne from Rockstar) because of all the reasons you already named and i would love to play more shooters not based on war. I generally prefer smaller scaled, personal stories compared to the out/overblown war action.

Edit2: Sorry, i repeated myself here.

 

[ElPatron]

About COD:MW: I really liked the first but everything after that started to get a bit to crazy for my taste. After what they did with the MW2 story you`re right about the third. My personal problem was that i disliked MW2 so much (storywise) that i couldn´t really care about MW3. It felt to much like bad sience fiction. I only played it to see a bit of over the top war action and it delivered.

I totally agree with the part about games not being books or movies. That's why gameplay will make me push trough a game with horrible story or graphics.

But I have seen Spec Ops's gameplay. Meh. So I just realized a lot of people are praising it's story. Shock value, big whoop.

I am not comparing games to books or movies. If I am going to watch/read a story I already experienced, at least the gameplay should be stellar.

snip

If you want to generalize JRPGs are always about teenage angst, the unknown hero that comes from a village who has a love interest that shuns him, emo people that are supposed to be badasses, giants swords and gravity defying haircuts.

Most of the things you find "wrong" with military shooters are also things I am not very fond of. But that doesn't mean ALL military themed shooters are like that.

 

[Vault101]

Most of the things you find "wrong" with military shooters are also things I am not very fond of. But that doesn't mean ALL military themed shooters are like that.

Id like to know then thease modern military shooters with decent single player

 

[ElPatron]

Id like to know then thease modern military shooters with decent single player

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series (not the recent ones)
SWAT series
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series (again, not the recent ones)
Operation Flashpoint (original game, GOTY version has a total of 3 campaigns: one as American, one as a rebel and one as a Russian)
Soldier of Fortune (don't touch Payback, that will actually give you cancer)

Depending on where you want to go with "modern", if 20th century is good for you then Brothers in Arms has good singleplayer and it's a military shooter. If you have a PSP, then Metal Gear Peace Walker, it's a lot more shooter than Portable Ops and it's also "modern" - you also see the run of the mill M16, AK47 etc during Cold War.

If you have a PS2, then Urban Chaos: Riot Response and Black.

If you're also willing to try shooters that are not first person, then Freedom Fighters ('Murrican rebels vs invading Russians).

 

[Korten12]

Well I just finished it less then 10 minutes ago and thought the gameplay is sort of meh, but I loved the story. Imo one of the best military shooter stories I have seen thus far.