Spec Ops: The Line Ending

[randomsix]

Picked the Cia guy

Shot at the ropes on the bridge

Punched a civvy in the face to get them to run off after lugo

Shot riggs

Didn't suicide

Left with the soldiers

Haven't felt like this about a game since the ending of Metro 2033.

 

[Hargrimm]

Let the interrogated soldier go.
Tried to save Gould to get Intel.
Attacked the snipers.
Shot Riggs. That single bullet wasn't going to do me any good anyway.
Meleed one of the civvies to get them to back up. Thankfully, it worked.
I shot Konrad more out of reflex than anything else.
Surrendered to the soldiers. I was tired of fighting and just wanted it to end.

[...]At the bridge I didn't chose any of the 2 guys but instead shoot the snipers. Which resulted in both of them getting shot. I felt I had to make a statement there - and figured those 2 hanging people were already doomed. [turns out they were actually already dead there, just a hallucination as you've seen in the ending].[...]

A little anecdote about that scene from me:
Instead of shooting at the snipers; I ordered my squadmates to take the right side first, in the hopes of taking them out quickly enough.
When you do that, Walker screams "ATTACK!" and Lugo answers with an incredulous "What?!".
At first I thought he was surprised by my decision, because he hadn't thought of that option or thought it was reckless or something.

But then, after the reveal you find out that from his perspective, Walker just starts screaming and shooting out of fucking nowhere after mumbling something about choice while staring at two corpses.
A very nice detail that's easily missed.

 

[Alssadar]

1.My first choice was to try and save Gould. Jumping down, I was met by a heavy and loads of enemy fire, and my death. So I reloaded and went with the civillians, but it turned out there were only two of them. I really regretted not saving Gould, as if Lugo trying to pull my guilt didn't help.
2. I shot the snipers. I was leaning more towards the same with the first choice (If you die, try another option), but I made it through okay. If I did die, I was going to shoot the soldier.
3. I gave Riggs the bullet. I can't justify my explanation for doing so, but it felt right at the time, like how I execute wounded enemies in STALKER.
4. I shot the civilians. At the time, there seemed no reasonable other choice, as I was sure Adams was going to break fire at any moment--and, in the aftermath, I realized I could have just shot in the air above them.
5. I let Konrad shoot me. With the guilt of all my actions, I felt that all my decisions to cheat death only resulted in the deaths of others--their justice had to be achieved. "The horror! The horror!"

 

[UrinalDook]

I'm actually astounded at the amount of people who shot the civilians who hanged Lugo. They've had the world fucked up by the American military, of course they'd do something like that.

Sad to say I'm one of those people. Once I put the controller down some time later, not only did I actually pause and consider what I'd just done (the game that brings that out of me is a rare one indeed), but I genuinely regretted what I'd done. The execution was just so... graphic, and Lugo had been characterised so well. Seeing him strung up like that, I was incensed - totally furious - and I just... opened up.

Very powerful game. Looking back, I view Spec Ops more like a piece of literature than a game. For sure, it wasn't exactly 'fun'.

 

[Guitarmasterx7]

I chose to try to save gould, shot the soldier out of the two hanging men, left riggs to burn, fired on the civilians after they killed my favorite character, and waited until "Konrad" shot me to see what would happen. Also, something I find really cool that ive never seen mentioned, the ending where walker is killed by the US soldiers at the end has a completely different meaning depending on whether you actually tried to kill them or if you just fired into the air.

 

[Ruag]

- Let the CIA guy go
- Tried to save Gould (for the mission)
- Shot the snipers because I wasn't there to judge people
- Shot Riggs because ... I couldn't let him burn after I burned half the city
- Didn't shot the civilians because there was too much death already
- Shot myself. That was the only clean way out.

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

Choices I remember:
Killed the old CIA guy
Didn't shoot the civilians after Lugo died
Did nothing at the end (apparently my imagination shot me). I figured it's my imagination, what's the worst that could happen.

Word on the street is that even the 'good' ending is imaginary though, so I don't know if I'd draw much solace from him being rescued.

 

[Susurrus]

PERSONAL HELL QUOTE

That's fine, but in this case, the black/white fades still don't make sense. Some are black, and some are white - if he died in the prologue, all should be white. Alternatively, only his memories should be fade to black - but why on earth is there a fade to white on the 2nd level, when he investigates the plane? It just makes no sense.

 

[Saviordd1]

PERSONAL HELL QUOTE

That's fine, but in this case, the black/white fades still don't make sense. Some are black, and some are white - if he died in the prologue, all should be white. Alternatively, only his memories should be fade to black - but why on earth is there a fade to white on the 2nd level, when he investigates the plane? It just makes no sense.

Its said that as its his personal hell he has to keep reliving it until he accepts what he's done, so its fading to white because he still isn't willing to accept that's what happened.

Again, in the end your supposed to take what you see from it, not what your supposed to take from it. This isn't 12th grade English class, there is no yes or no answer.

 

[teh_gunslinger]

Seems we made pretty much the same decisions, save for the civilians after the lynching. Once Walker got backed into a corner and the rocks started flying, I kinda lost it, meaning to fire above them but ended up firing directly into the crowd. Amazing what kinda mindset the game's story can put you in. I too felt sympathy for Walker, however hard he tried to make me hate him. Seems more to me that he wasn't evil, just a man dropped into a completely FUBAR situation who was not prepared or able to handle it. Absolutely amazing game.

Personally, the most messed up part was the fact that he was a soldier willing to do good. Sure, him wanting to become a hero was fueled with some selfish desires, but, he still genuinely wanted to save people. And, because of one horrific mistake... well... there you go.

:/

Actually I think his mistake was a lot earlier. When he first made contact and started shooting at US troops he should have pulled back, asked for updated orders and sought out more intell instead of just barging on like a bull in a china shop.

Pretty much every fucked up thing that happens is because he doesn't stop to think right in the beginning.

Doesn't make him any less of a tragic figure (after all stubborn blindness is a classic feature of Greek tragedy) but it changes the mortar incident from a mistake to a consequence.

 

[Thanatos5150]

Seems we made pretty much the same decisions, save for the civilians after the lynching. Once Walker got backed into a corner and the rocks started flying, I kinda lost it, meaning to fire above them but ended up firing directly into the crowd. Amazing what kinda mindset the game's story can put you in. I too felt sympathy for Walker, however hard he tried to make me hate him. Seems more to me that he wasn't evil, just a man dropped into a completely FUBAR situation who was not prepared or able to handle it. Absolutely amazing game.

Personally, the most messed up part was the fact that he was a soldier willing to do good. Sure, him wanting to become a hero was fueled with some selfish desires, but, he still genuinely wanted to save people. And, because of one horrific mistake... well... there you go.

:/

Actually I think his mistake was a lot earlier. When he first made contact and started shooting at US troops he should have pulled back, asked for updated orders and sought out more intell instead of just barging on like a bull in a china shop.

Pretty much every fucked up thing that happens is because he doesn't stop to think right in the beginning.

Doesn't make him any less of a tragic figure (after all stubborn blindness is a classic feature of Greek tragedy) but it changes the mortar incident from a mistake to a consequence.

The entire Dubai incident was a cavalcade of mistake;: not all of them Walker's.
There were numerous times in the narrative - and I do mean numerous, where Lugo and Adams both acknowledge that Walker was losing his grip on Reality. At any one of those times, they could have - and should have - deemed him unfit for command and exfiltrated.

 

[LarenzoAOG]

Saved the Civilians, killed the snipers, mercy killed the agent, scared away the lynchers.

At the end I opted to have Walker shoot himself the first time around, it seemed at that point in the game he didn't want to live, and if he did he would be seriously fucked in the head, I felt really bad for him and at the time I thought I was doing him a favor. Really goes to show how good Yager is at making games, even if they aren't good at spelling German words. I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders when I got a message saying "You are still a good person." on a loading screen after I beat the game, because I sorta felt like a terrible person playing throughout the game, that game really doesn't pull the punches.

 

[Yokai]

Going through the game, I felt more and more disconnected from Walker as he got more and more obsessed with being in the right. I tried to save the civilians, failed, and just went with it, but afterwards...shot Riggs, shot the hanging soldier, and let the lynch mob run, because at that point I couldn't help but think their actions were practically justified. At the end, well, had Walker kill himself. I thought Konrad being dead pretty well blew his last chance at any sort of redemption.

Then I realized that would be a situation where I, personally, would probably shoot myself as well, and pretty much just zoned out for a bit. Thinking about that ending I still kind of just want to cry. This game probably affected me emotionally more than any other piece of media. The writers deserve an award for taking the Call of Duty-style jingoistic all-american hero and hitting him in the metaphorical dick with a sledgehammer, and I no longer consider Nolan North to be the boring everyman of video games. His performance, especially near the end, was just stunningly good.

Fuck, man. Spec Ops is something else.

 

[Bobbovski]

I "chose" to save Gould (I didn't even realize I was supposed to make a choice since I kind of got distracted when the alternatives were explained to me)
I tried to shoot all of the soldiers in front of the gate instead of using the white phosphorus
I shot the soldier
I let Riggs burn
I punched/pushed the civilians after Lugo died
I Killed myself/let "konrad" shoot me

 

[Akytalusia]

saved the civilians, shot the snipers[footnote]if i play through again, i'll shoot the ropes instead. should have occured to me. -.-[/footnote], shot riggs, fired into the air, and killed myself.

 

[sagitel]

i played only once (god its so depressing for a second play through) and these are the decisions i made:

i tried to save civilians not guold but ended having both of them killed

I i shot the guy who stole water in the highway. law is brutal.

I didnt shoot the CIA guy i let him suffer the pain and die a slow pain

I didnt fired at the civilians that lynched Lugo. i was just too sad and i believed i shouldn't kill any civilian.

My ending was konrad/walker shoot walker. my interpretation is that this means walker believed that konrad was alive and he believed all the lies he created for himself. he decided to believe konrad was alive even when he saw his corpse. he thought the lies to be real and when an illusion shot him he believed the shooting and died.

 

[tangoprime]

My choices were my own and they were more and more depressing the more I thought about it, that was pretty much the end of shooters for me. I could have stopped at any time, but I didn't.

Precisely. I've heard people complain about how a lot of the big story moments take the choice away from the player (the WP scene in particular) but I think that that's really the point. Getting the player to blame the developers for forcing their hand, in the same way that Walker blames Konrad and the 33rd. But, like Walker, the player is only fooling him/herself when in reality there is a choice for both of them: just walk away.

God damn this game is meta.

That's exactly what I loved about it. You had the choice all along to stop playing whenever, just like Walker had the choice to walk away but didn't. This one has directly led to all my copies of Call of Modern Duty Warfare: Combined Black Operations to start collecting dust on the shelf.

 

[Callate]

I did the same as the OP did, save that I tried to save Gould rather than the civilians (at that point I still believed there was a mission worth salvaging, "the greater good" and all that.)

I still have the save file with the post-credits sequence, and I can't quite bring myself to have Walker open fire on his would-be rescuers. My curiosity just isn't strong enough to do something I feel so unequivocally wrong, pixels or not.

In a way, it would have been perfectly reasonable for Walker to have killed himself upon Konrad revealing the truth, but at the same time, having come so far, it would have made the horrors Walker had experienced getting there somehow meaningless.

 

[Lucky Godzilla]

1. Went for Gould, the civilians would die, but if the intel I retrieved could save more, well than maybe it would have been worth it.
2. Shot at the snipers. Even though I couldn't save them, better they die while I try to defend them than me executing a hapless man.
3. Shot Riggs, everyone deserves a measure of mercy, no matter what they have done.
4. Shot in the air, I killed enough already.
5. Killed myself.

 

[hermes]

1- Didn't shoot the escaping soldier.
2- Tried to save Gould.
3- Shoot the renegade soldier instead of the family man (tried to kill the snipers but I was killed, so I assumed it wasn't an option).
4- Let Riggs burn.
5- Spare the civilians by shooting above them.
6- Shoot Konrad.
7- Attack the soldiers but died.

I then played several times to get all the other trophies and see the other options. Didn't even look at the trophy list until I completed the game.