Spec ops the line trophies1/7/2024 ![]() I’m left to choose which man should die, by my own bullet. On the left, the soldier who apprehended him, disgraced for an overzealous arrest that resulted in the death of the thief’s family. On the right was a water thief, battered after his arrest and awaiting execution for his crime. Konrad had two men strung up above the sand by their wrists, with sniper squads targeting each one. More often than not, soldiers find themselves in the grey area on the battlefield.”ĭavis referred then to a decision I was forced to make during my preview. “We’ve researched and we’ve found that a lot of these situations are not really decisions between good and bad. What we’re trying to do is not exploit the player or just provoke some sort of disgust or something like that type of emotion, but, more than anything, allow to sort of put himself into those situations,” lead designer Cory Davis explained. “I think one of the things that’s super important with touching on these themes is that we take them very, very seriously and we try to treat them with respect. The Line‘s narrative ambitions are huge, which has led the dev team to keep its sights firmly locked on the video game medium’s most difficult target: a player’s emotional center. The tricky part for Yager is navigating the murky waters of controversial subject matter and a story that is inspired, in large part, by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. If Uncharted is analagous with Indiana Jones then Spec Ops is more in tune with something like, say, The Hurt Locker. Spec Ops has that same sense of delivery, the feeling that you’re “playing” a blockbuster movie. Its gameplay and tone may be different, but it is a series that depends on its narrative flow to propel the play. Uncharted is really the more like-minded sibling. Hearing this, I quickly realized that my Fallujah comparison was a knee-jerk response. “So we wouldn’t want to say that we are real and we are speaking for real troops, real people.” Not everyone even actually fights,” she explained. “The risk is, if you say real, then you risk pissing off a lot of people that have had a huge diversity of experiences in war. “You are not actually in combat just saying this is or was real isn’t necessarily going to bring someone into that, which is why we’ve gone for the more hyper-realistic approach to the world, to the situations that these characters happen into.”ĢK Games producer Lulu Lamer chimed in at this point. “We wanted to create a hyper-realized kind of world that would… essentially heighten what the player is feeling, emotionally,” Williams explained. Spec Ops lead writer Walt Williams cautioned me when I asked for his thoughts the cancelled game, explaining that documentary-level realism is not something Yager’s game is shooting for. The game was intended to offer a playable chronicle of one real-life Marine squad’s experiences during the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004. The preview got me thinking about Six Days in Fallujah, the tactical shooter developed by Atomic Games that Konami was to publish before controversy brought all work to a halt. On the contrary, the two feel as though they’re interwoven in some genuinely creative ways. There’s a sense that narrative frequently gets to take precedence over gameplay, though based on what I saw it never comes at the expense of either. Spec Ops might initially seem somewhat vanilla on paper, but there’s a definite craft behind its moving parts that makes it stand out. I recently sat down to tour through a 90-minute summation of gameplay and plot developments over roughly the first half of the story, and the interactive narrative Yager’s assembled definitely seems to deliver. Walker and his team arrive to find themselves facing off against a brutal yet charismatic madman with a misplaced sense of honor and a battalion of American soldiers willing to lay their lives on the line for him. He and his soldiers were the first sent to assist in the ruined city’s evacuation efforts, but contact was cut off when the order was given to pull out and Konrad refused. They’ve been sent to locate the AWOL battalion commander, Colonel John Konrad. Protagonist Martin Walker and his two squadmates tread an uneven path through the sandstorm-ravaged streets and highrises of Dubai, one filled with difficult choices and unlikely enemies. ![]() The game emerges from the shadows now looking even more haggard than before, and all the better for it. This one had more naked emotion than most, and a fair amount of grit to roughen its smooth skin, but it was very much what it was also supposed to be: an E3 first look. The game was first revealed at E3 2010, looking on paper like another brown military action game set in a desert environment. After 18 months of silence, Yager Developments and 2K Games are finally putting their narrative-driven third-person shooter, Spec Ops: The Line, in front of outsider eyes again.
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