• Why I love being the 'hero' in Spec Ops: The Line
    34 replies, posted
You are not understanding my point. Walt Williams himself has said on numberous occasions, players are not suppose to know who they've killed with the final shell, you are suppose to pull that trigger and not think twice about it, the final victims are litterally suppose to be unidentifiable white dot's to the player. What you and Walker have really done is only suppose to be revealed to the player once they go down there and walk amoung the gleeful death and destruction that you've caused. The player is suppose to walk down there initially feeling shit, because they've just killed a bunch of American soldiers with a god awful weapon, but you can live with that because it's [I]just[/I] soldiers who are the [I]bad [/I]guys, the sucker punch is suppose to be the cutscene at the end. Unfortuantely the game sign posted it though how it handled that segment. To put it another way, my problem with that part of the game is, i knew exactly what was coming, I wish i did not.
[QUOTE=Novangel;50865853]It's because the games where you're a hero never has a focus of having you reflect on your actions. When Spec Ops does so, the whole reflection part seems kind of cheap when you had barely any choice to begin with. [editline]11th August 2016[/editline] Like said it'll have been much more powerful if the game encouraged you to solve your problems via the horrible methods than force them down your throat.[/QUOTE] But if you had the choice to be a "good guy", it would entirely defeat the point.
[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;50865499]So wait, when a game is linear and forces you to be the hero even if you had no choice in the matter it's fine, but when a game forces you to be a dick it's bad writing?[/QUOTE] Of course not. The problem is when that's the game's main story gimmick and it's executed poorly (especially along with the rest of the game). [editline]a[/editline] For example, let's pretend there's a hypothetical situation in one of these popular open-world stealth "do it how you want" games like MGSV and Dishonored and etc. Let's say your goal is to prevent some uprising or something from happening one way or another and your options are "stab this fucker through his stomach because for some reason if he dies the uprising doesn't happen" or "sneak your way to his PC or some shit and go through his emails and shit and report back that "here's their weapons depot and they've got bombs and shit here etc."" Either way you win, the uprising doesn't happen, there's no rioting on the streets and people dying. The difference is either you kill a man, or your just take his information. Now say he's got a daughter, and if you kill him, you trigger a cutscene where you kill the shit out of him, turn around, and there's she is staring at you after you just killed her father. If you just fuck with his PC, that doesn't happen, she doesn't see their father murdered and grow up without them, etc. Whenever there's a choice like this, and it's not some "the only way to progress the storyline is to [sp]set a bunch of refugees on fire[/sp]" bullshit, I'm totally, 100% okay with the game making me feel like garbage like that. I'd admit "okay, I fucked up, that was me" because it was entirely up to me to make the right decision and I fucked it up. I mean this is all strictly hypothetical and it's some garbage writing with probably hundreds of flaws but I'm just trying to get a point across. Whenever Dishonored told me that "the higher the bodycount, the more disease and rats fill the city" I immediately decided "I'm not going to kill everyone then" and started exploiting all of the options for pacifist stuff, only ever killing people when it was totally necessary (like when I quicksave in the middle of a mansion full of guards but I fucked up and it's as soon as I got spotted so there's no way to avoid a fight) even if it was more work in the long run. I fired my gun maybe a total of 10 times throughout the entire playthrough, and a good majority of those were on the last level because at that point the city and ending are no longer affected my actions. SOTL doesn't have a "you can follow orders and not be the absolute worst person" option, and that's what makes it "bad writing" in my opinion. I mean yeah, the first time around the game holds up if you don't get bored of the shitty gameplay you get, but if you try to play it a second time with the "okay, I'm going to be a good person" mindset, you can't, because they don't allow it. [editline]11th August 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;50869282]But if you had the choice to be a "good guy", it would entirely defeat the point.[/QUOTE] Would it, though? When you see those white dots moving through a trench the first time, are you thinking "hmm, I bet those aren't soldiers and I should hold off fire" or are you thinking "oh fuck that's a lot of them I should take them out?" The game'd be [I]more[/I] impactful if you had the option to not kill everyone and still chose to.
I wish more games had endings as interactive as this one did. That was something I really liked, having so much control over when and how the story ends like that.
But, player choice in the matter would entirely defeat the purpose. This isn't Deus Ex. When Half-Life makes you be the hero, and you want to go back through a second time and be the villain, you can't. The game railroads you into be a specific person when that's not who you really are. I'm not gonna call my lack of choice in Half-Life bad writing, however, because it set out to accomplish specific goals and succeeded at that. It's a game about watching a dude descend further into madness after consistently failing to do the right thing, and the player going along with the ride while (hopefully) being totally blind to the outcome of the game, knowing that for every bad thing that happened in the game it will be made okay because you're the protagonist and the protagonist is always the hero. Being able to go back and not [sp]do the white phosphorus thing[/sp], would totally destroy what the game was out to do, which is to examine the typical protagonist, and the player's relationship with that protagonist, in an action game with a critical lens. Being able to go back and board the train to Nova Prospekt instead of following barney in HL2 would entirely destroy the narrative and the themes of lack of control re: the GMan. I'm not telling you that you can't hate the game. Maybe you found the gameplay boring, that's fine. Maybe you found its message poorly executed or too heavy-handed. That's also totally fine, I could see how one would feel that. But lack of player choice? Then you automatically take issue with Doom, Half-Life, Call of Duty, Halo, and every other linear action game ever made. But you won't, because if you're forced to be a hero when you want to be a hero it's fun and it feels good, but if the game makes you an irredeemable monster it's different for some reason. [editline]11th August 2016[/editline] I have huge issues with the game, mostly gameplay related because it was frankly boring and too difficult, but I wish more games would try different shit like this in regards to narrative. I liked its little hints about his madness, what with things going on in cutscenes and characters breaking fourth wall and talking directly to the camera and textures changing on you and shit like that. Cool shit like the level design constantly making you walk downhill, even when you somehow go from the ground to the top of a skyscraper, to show the decline in sanity. Cool little touches like that. Basically lots of horror game tropes, just not in a horror game. I'd like to see more games take psychological routes like this, but do it better. What I'm trying to say is that regardless of success, I commend them for at least trying to do something different and interesting. We need more of that. [editline]11th August 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=gk99;50869537] Would it, though? When you see those white dots moving through a trench the first time, are you thinking "hmm, I bet those aren't soldiers and I should hold off fire" or are you thinking "oh fuck that's a lot of them I should take them out?" The game'd be [I]more[/I] impactful if you had the option to not kill everyone and still chose to.[/QUOTE] If you could kill them, and didn't, there would be no impact at all. There would be no decent into madness, no examination of a man constantly trying to justify his actions. The entire plot, story, and tone would be dramatically changed for the entire game. It wouldn't matter anymore, and the game would be just another boring generic white guy saves the day story, with nothing novel or original to it. The only thing that made it somewhat interesting, the writing, is now totally gone. [editline]11th August 2016[/editline] Though now that I think about it, maybe having choices would be interesting insofar as making a secret horror game. I've always wondered if you could make a normal game that played through like a standard game, but maybe if you pulled at certain, subtle threads at certain points the game would begin to unravel itself. That would be cool for a different experiment.
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