Spec Ops: The Line - Heart of Darkness with guns

[Ulminati]

This thread is full of haters.

Haters? On the Codex!?

 

[Cowboy Moment]

It's kind of funny, but I think Far Cry 3's endings, which have caused considerable butthurt amongst the mentally challenged, do a better job at using the medium to subvert the cliche. There's no Tyler Durden reveal and no attempts to guilt trip the player. You merely spend the whole game delivering violence upon other sentient beings and feeling awesome about it, and in the ending you find out that this comes at a cost - there is no good choice, and there shouldn't be. Although the "Leave the island" ending should have you kill Dennis in self defense to drive the point home even further.

 

[Sodafish]

This thread is full of haters.

Haters? On the Codex!?

 

[DeepOcean]

Seriously, what is it with this evil capitalist line of accusation? The game sold like shit, it wasn't a money grab by any means. You don't see Call of Duty having you crack the necks of fallen enemies for ammo and the like. It just feels like you people are grasping at straws. It was a good game. Not a great game, and certainly no gem. Just a good game. That's that. Unless you can somehow specify a shooter with a deeper and more thought provoking story and theme you have no arguments.

Plus the very medium of a game is what makes the story shine the way it does. You wouldn't have these same moral quandries while watching Apocalypse Now or or Heart of Darkness, as those exist in entirely different realms. Undoubtedly their stories and methods of telling them are superior, but they are in no way as interactive or as immersive to the viewer as a video game.

Going by your logic a game is either Tetris-incarnate in the gameplay department or it has no reason for existing. That's a pretty dreadful view to ascribe to.

I really believe that games can be a good medium to tell a story, the problem is the lack of interactivity. There is this huge disconnect between the gameplay and the cutscenes. It's the same problem I have with GTA 4 and other games that try to tell a serious story but don't have a serious gameplay. My experience was: Okey, when this shitty shooting is going to stop, and anything interesting is going to happen... Finally, the game remembered that is suposed to be serious.... No, Gears of War shitty gameplay again... I have to use white phosporous now, really? The game is trying to make me feel guilty for something beyond my control? ... Thousands of bodies and emotional engaging cutscenes later... Konrad: You are evil, dude, it is happening crazy shit on your head, it´s war insanity. The war insanity consumed your neurons, Walker... THE END. I had a feeling that I wasted my time. Because the gameplay is so generic, the only thing going on is the story. To me: Spec Ops: the line - gameplay = Shitty Apocalypse Now. What is the point of making a shitty Apocalypse Now? Maybe a shitty Apocalypse Now is better than the Call of Duty retarded friendly story, but I still feel underwhelmed.

Developer 1: Guys, we have a problem.
Developer 2: What problem?
Developer 1: The gameplay is boring, we need to do something to attract attention.
Developer 2: How about we add a tacked on story, we could copy Apocalypse Now, those guys are so tired of the Call of Duty bullshit that they are going to love.
Developer 1: But we did a Gears of war clone.
Developer 2: Nobody is going to notice, we can even say that we made on purpose to serve as a counterpoint to the story.
After the game failure to sell because of the boring gameplay:
Developer 1 and 2: We tried... the game world is not ready for our vision.

 

[Ermm]

This thread is full of haters.

Yes, you know, because it's unfair to say the game is bad, just because gameplay sucks balls.

Just as it is unfair to say that Uwe Boll is a bad director, just because his movies are total turds.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[Cowboy Moment]

This thread is full of haters.

Yes, you know, because it's unfair to say the game is bad, just because gameplay sucks balls.

Just as it is unfair to say that Uwe Boll is a bad director, just because his movies are total turds.

"Silent Hill 2 is a bad game, because the gameplay sucks balls."

I know you're trying to be edgier than that razor-thin bridge ragheads have to cross to reach paradise, my brother, but do consider the fact that context matters a whole lot in these kinds of situations. Objectively speaking, PST's "gameplay" isn't anything to write home about either, but the writing and execution make it amazing. The problem with Spec Ops isn't so much that the gameplay sucks, but that it's completely disconnected from the narrative in a thematic sense.

 

[Ermm]

Actually, I don't think Silent Hill 2 is this ''awesum deeep experience'' like everyone else says it is. Personally, I liked SH1 story better.

I know that quality of gameplay found in survival horror games is a topic of preference, but at least Silent Hill has some kind of exploration, puzzles, non-regenerative health. But at the end, I agree, it's gameplay is not the one which would make you scream out loud, but at least there is something more when comparing it to the new Spec Ops: The Line.

Comparing it to Silent Hill, Spec Ops: The Line is just a claustrophobic corridor with regenerative health, and story which miserably tries to elevate a very miserable game. I can't really see that developers of this game had fun while making it.

And c'mon, at least SH and Planescape Torment were unique in terms of story, and not some military ''akzhun'' which is aware of its own stupidness, while trying to put itself on some kind of pedestal, just because it is aware of itself.

 

[buzz]

The gameplay in Silent Hill 2 is not bad because it's survival horror gameplay. This is like saying "Thief has bad gameplay because you can't kill everyone while you press the awesome button".

Seriously, why the fuck are we comparing actually good story-driven games with this?
Planescape Torment has decent if somewhat subpar RPG mechanics and combat, we get it . But Planescape Torment excels at everything else. The visuals are instantly memorable, from the moment you begin the game. The writing is good from the beginning, the C&C is there from the very first encounters (I count the smaller stuff in here as well). You know when I realized that I'm playing a really great video game? When I got out of the morturary without killing one single soul.

Same with Silent Hill 2. That game has bleak, depressing and genuinely frightening atmosphere of the bat. It's not just the story that held it for me, I don't even care about the plot that much (which is why I like SH3 more). But the game is scary, the game is atmospheric and the game works. Shall I talk about the music in both games?

Compare that to Spec Ops which is bland as fuck. It starts in the desert and it's about shooting a bunch of people. It has nowhere near the same impressive opening as those two games did. It does not stand on its own with the world building, with the atmosphere, not until very late into the game at least.

Planescape Torment didn't start with me picking elf as my PC race and starting a "revenge journey". Silent Hill 2 didn't start with dogs jumping out of a window. This games were true deconstructions of tropes in the medium, not some vague-ass crap.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

My point is that "survival horror gameplay" is often mechanically poor. You spend your time walking around with bad controls and shitty camera angles, occasionally engage in awkward combat, and solve easy puzzles. However, these deficiencies are intentional, and serve a specific purpose. They reinforce the atmosphere, and actually make sense in context - it's perfectly reasonable for your average everyman protagonist to be bad at fighting, for instance.

For the record, I don't think Spec Ops is actually good. But I do think that writing it off as "shit gameplay = shit game" is missing the point a bit. I find it kind of interesting because it's another high profile game which tries to be a bit more ambitious with its narrative. Clearly, some developers feel like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is not the best that can be done in this regards. Their problem, really, is that they still have to pander to the lower common denominator with the gameplay, and so the end result feels somewhat schizophrenic. This is the case for Spec Ops, DX:HR, Far Cry 3, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

Overall though, I think the tendency bodes well. Maybe some of those dudes end up in smaller studios eventually, and get to make games where the gameplay reinforces the narrative rather than being totally disconnected from it. Or, maybe they smarten up and look at the problem from the other end: "I'm making a cover shooter. What kind of plot would go really well with my cover-shooty gameplay?". Why doesn't anyone make a parody of CoD, where all the tacticoolness and fear-mongering and jingoism and massacres of brown people are exaggerated to the point where they become hilarious? Or maybe that's Black Ops 2, you never know with these games.

 

[DeepOcean]

Their problem, really, is that they still have to pander to the lower common denominator with the gameplay, and so the end result feels somewhat schizophrenic. This is the case for Spec Ops, DX:HR, Far Cry 3, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

Imagine that you could do really evil, war crime level shit on Spec Ops: the Line (really do and not only watch on cutscenes). Imagine if the enemies reacted more like real human beings, instead of cannon fodder robots to kill without guilt. Imagine the media reaction: Spec Ops: the line makes our children anti-patriotic psychopaths, the goverment should do something to protect our dumb children. I really don't have problem with the developers taking the easy way, they need to pay the bills, but I really don't like hipocrisy, gaming journalists pretending that Spec Ops is a really serious artsy discussion about war instead of a game with a poorly thought, convoluted, poorly told story full of narrative gimmicks and cheap shock moments( You see Walker! It's a mother holding her child, Walker!You monster... Hey Walker! You are seeing those guys hanged, crazy shit happened bro... You are seeing this fucking huge red pillar Walker? Its your insanity meter, it's full, it means you are batshit insane).

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Well, supposedly Spec Ops didn't sell that well, so maybe they should have gone all out like that. After all, we've already had MW2 with the airport massacre scene, how much worse could the outrage get?

 

[Weierstraß]

but I really don't like hipocrisy, gaming journalists pretending that Spec Ops is a really serious artsy discussion about war

But who thinks that? Spec Ops is not about war, it's about shooters.

 

[DeepOcean]

but I really don't like hipocrisy, gaming journalists pretending that Spec Ops is a really serious artsy discussion about war

But who thinks that? Spec Ops is not about war, it's about shooters.

And modern military shooters are all about war and military culture.

 

[Weierstraß]

And that is completely irrelevant.

 

[Angthoron]

Fuck you guys. Here's how you set up a player for a proper fall:

1) Create a LOT of achievements, each of them given out for negative actions. Make these achievements tiered, say, 7 tiers or so, to keep compulsive achievement hunters going out of their way doing shit, from kicking puppies to mugging/theft to murder of civilians.

2) Set up a way in which the player begins to subtly/not-so-subtly see the consequences of his actions. DEHR has this on a certain level - steal shit from Sarif's employees, start getting requests to look into it, spiralling into further and further paranoia and accusations. Take it further, lead it from "Oh hey, there's a thief I could hunt?" to "Hey, it's me! LOL" to "Shit, I didn't really mean for THAT to happen, fuck fuck", preferably a little down the line so the player can't fall back to an earlier save.

3) Eventually reveal that the player's been an enormous douche, to put it mildly, throughout the course of the game, while they chased their achievements. Dead children/genocide/rivers of blood/mass hysteria.

Don't you feel bad now, player? All the while you could've avoided it, but you wanted those achievements, so have 'em.

 

[Angthoron]

Fuck you guys. Here's how you set up a player for a proper fall:

1) Create a LOT of achievements, each of them given out for negative actions. Make these achievements tiered, say, 7 tiers or so, to keep compulsive achievement hunters going out of their way doing shit, from kicking puppies to mugging/theft to murder of civilians.

2) Set up a way in which the player begins to subtly/not-so-subtly see the consequences of his actions. DEHR has this on a certain level - steal shit from Sarif's employees, start getting requests to look into it, spiralling into further and further paranoia and accusations. Take it further, lead it from "Oh hey, there's a thief I could hunt?" to "Hey, it's me! LOL" to "Shit, I didn't really mean for THAT to happen, fuck fuck", preferably a little down the line so the player can't fall back to an earlier save.

3) Eventually reveal that the player's been an enormous douche, to put it mildly, throughout the course of the game, while they chased their achievements. Dead children/genocide/rivers of blood/mass hysteria.

Don't you feel bad now, player? All the while you could've avoided it, but you wanted those achievements, so have 'em.

Isn't this we always expected from C&C? But I would say that this is really the 'visual novel' perspective of games. Which is completely fair BTW. This is actually a great way to make the player emotionally engaged within the game unlike what Biowhore does with Romances and buttsex.

Yes, this is what's expected of C&C in general. Some games do this, but only a few do this properly. Often you end up being like "What the fuck, really?" when the "consequence" catches up with you - it's not really a logical conclusion, it's not what you'd expect to happen necessarily.

Of the examples when it's done well, there's stuff in DEHR, like I said, the thieving example being one, and the others being spending too long time exploring before taking off on the first mission ends up with hostages being killed, as well as sparing a dangerous terrorist may have good and bad sides to it; and, say, Witcher 1, where helping Scoia'tel in the beginning does enable them to kill some important people in the future. Thing with these is that THEY MAKE SENSE. You can see them coming. It's not spelled out for you, but you should've known better, you should've paid attention.

As a nice counter-example of linear consequence, there's Deadlight. A nice enough game in its own right, I rather enjoyed it as a puzzle platformer. However, it has these two endings. Both come out of the blue, and you really had ZERO input in either one. All the clues dropped are basically played out in cutscenes. Oh yeah, and spoiler alert, you end up being the bad guy in that game. Through NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING you did as a player. You didn't even have a chance to press a button to fire phosphorous munitions, or kill people in droves. Not a fucking thing.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

My point is that "survival horror gameplay" is often mechanically poor. You spend your time walking around with bad controls and shitty camera angles, occasionally engage in awkward combat, and solve easy puzzles. However, these deficiencies are intentional, and serve a specific purpose. They reinforce the atmosphere, and actually make sense in context - it's perfectly reasonable for your average everyman protagonist to be bad at fighting, for instance.

Hmm. This is a really an interesting point.

But what if it can be done without being awkward? To be honest I felt that Doom 3 did it okay. Yeah it was quite without depth and after a while you learned to expect zombies to jump out of every corner. But otherwise the mechanics was solid (except the mutually exclusive lamp/gun; but that was a design decision and I understand why it was there). The game had very traditional shooter mechanics, FP view and NO COVER. Still the dread of being in that world was palpable atleast to me.

I would also quote Dark Corners of the Earth except for its blurry screen.

Would you say that such a mechanics is excusable if the player is actively seeking out the realism in games under such situations?

For example in DCotE, the mechanics is supposed to create the impression of the character condition, which I think is done well enough.

As far as I'm concerned, the way to do this well is for the player to have no ability to fight back.

The problem with having mechanically sound combat in a horror game is twofold. For one, the player may end up enjoying it, which makes the very existence of monsters completely pointless, since the player does not fear them at all. They may startle him by jumping out of cupboards, but that's the extent of their contribution to the game's atmosphere. The second problem is more fundamental. Horror thrives on the feeling of helplessness, of having little to no control over one's fate, of being isolated and constantly unsafe. The ability to fight effectively undermines all of these. It also changes the way the player perceives the game - to put it simply, it switches them from "flight" mode to "fight" mode. You either succeed at killing a monster in combat, or you fail, in which case you just have to play better. This was a problem with the first Penumbra game, where the intentionally awkward combat made parts of it silly.

There is really only one game that managed to pull this off - System Shock 2. It simply made combat a major drain on precious and scarce resources, a battle of attrition. This made the player actively dread it, and avoid whenever possible. However, most developers don't want to do this, because it only really works if the threat of losing due to not being efficient enough is real, and not just an illusion (like in HL2 or Amnesia). You can conceivably just reach a point where you can't advance anymore in SS2, because you've used up too much stuff, or your build isn't good enough, and so forth.

DCotE is actually a good illustration of my point. It's very creepy and atmospheric as long as you're relatively defenseless, and can only run away from danger. After you acquire enough guns, it becomes a mediocre shooter where you kill Dagon with a rocket launcher.

 

[DeepOcean]

And that is completely irrelevant.

Spec ops is a copy a of gears of war/CoD in terms of gameplay, there is shooting galleries, corridors, waves of enemies, regenerative health, obligatory machinegun on helicopter setpiece, there is nothing new, so they weren't trying to make a commentary about the gameplay of a modern shooter. You can see alot of ideas inspired in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, the protagonist becomes more and more insane because the crimes he commited trying to save people.

Alot of gaming journalists compares the story of this game with the story of the Call of Dutys and say how this game shows the true consequences of the things you do on the Call of Dutys.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Have you played Penumbra or Amnesia, Captain Shrek? Those are more or less what I'm referring to. Fundamentally, I think adventure games are where horror is best achieved. Some amount of "stealth" (aka running and hiding from monsters) helps a lot too, but for the most part, the player should be exploring the environment, and trying to find solutions to problems they encounter. Monster encounters should be fairly rare and meaningful. Frankly, some of the scariest games I've ever played were Myst-style adventures with very few opportunities for death (like Scratches, such an amazing game).

 

[buzz]

Well, one of my favorite horror games is Anchorhead so there's that .
I think though that calling the "survival horror" gameplay as mechanically poor is mistaken. A game does not have poor gameplay if the mechanics serve it right. Otherwise we put games like Dead Space or Alan Wake over Silent Hill or Clock Tower, which is pretty wrong.
Again, Thief does not have bad gameplay just because you can't oneshot kill your enemies like in Dishonored or whatever new stealth abomination. Megaman is not a bad action platformer because you can't shoot in multiple directions, it was designed that way. What about Myst, do you think the game is better if it has real-time movement?
Same with Silent Hill 2. The camera angles serve the cinematic aspect and give a sense of claustrophobia to the player. The controls aren't bad because they were designed for consoles. The gameplay is more about evasion rather than engaging in combat (which is why you have very limited resources). You don't have limb-cutting guns or a might foot that can stop monsters in one hit, and that makes it more efficient as a horror game than Dead Space.
I do agree that some of the elements are poor (which is why I find Fatal Frame to be the superior series) but most of it is what makes the game tick.

That's not the case with Spec Ops though. The gameplay is not even mechanically poor or shit, it's just bland. It doesn't make me feel like I'm engaged in realistic modern warfare. Compare that to Deus Ex HR which is obviously inferior to the original, but still gave me a degree of liberty and engaged me in a cyberpunk world.

 

[Weierstraß]

And that is completely irrelevant.

Spec ops is a copy a of gears of war/CoD in terms of gameplay, there is shooting galleries, corridors, waves of enemies, regenerative health, obligatory machinegun on helicopter setpiece, there is nothing new, so they weren't trying to make a commentary about the gameplay of a modern shooter. You can see alot of ideas inspired in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, the protagonist becomes more and more insane because the crimes he commited trying to save people.

Alot of gaming journalists compares the story of this game with the story of the Call of Dutys and say how this game shows the true consequences of the things you do on the Call of Dutys.

The connections to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse are very superficial taking a few points and broad themes but little else. Your final paragraph argues the point you seemed to previously object to, so I don't even know what you're trying to say.

A game does not have poor gameplay if the mechanics serve it right.

So Spec Ops has good gameplay then?

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I would seriously suggest that you at least play the Penumbra games. They're very good (the second one is a serious contender for best horror game of all time imo), not that long, and it's hard to have a discussion about modern horror games without referring to those.

On the action front, I think I've given some fairly compelling reasons as to why it doesn't mesh that well with horror. Even SS2 becomes notably less scary in the later parts, where there's more combat and you become a packrat superman. Also, SS2's atmosphere is very hard to duplicate. For example, if you just replaced Hybrids with cultists, and the ship with Innsmouth, the game would instantly lose a lot of its oppressive atmosphere - a lot of it comes from the feeling of complete isolation, with no safehouse to go back to, and nary a living human in sight for the entirety of the game.

Also, to use a purely empirical argument, there are a fair amount of great horror games with "adventury" gameplay, and just SS2 on the "actiony" side. Doom 3 is not a good horror game, it's just not especially scary.

 

[DeepOcean]

And that is completely irrelevant.

Spec ops is a copy a of gears of war/CoD in terms of gameplay, there is shooting galleries, corridors, waves of enemies, regenerative health, obligatory machinegun on helicopter setpiece, there is nothing new, so they weren't trying to make a commentary about the gameplay of a modern shooter. You can see alot of ideas inspired in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, the protagonist becomes more and more insane because the crimes he commited trying to save people.

Alot of gaming journalists compares the story of this game with the story of the Call of Dutys and say how this game shows the true consequences of the things you do on the Call of Dutys.

The connections to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse are very superficial taking a few points and broad themes but little else. Your final paragraph argues the point you seemed to previously object to, so I don't even know what you're trying to say.

A game does not have poor gameplay if the mechanics serve it right.

So Spec Ops has good gameplay then?

I'm just nerd raging, man. Spec Ops is just a mediocre shooter with a pretentious story. I just rage about the lack of criticism of gaming journalists. They all say how wonderful the story of this game is (it's just a pretentious, unoriginal story) and dismiss the horrible gameplay as something unimportant. I know it is a waste of time, but sometimes you need to relieve your frustation.

 

[Angthoron]

Hurgh, yeah, well, I'm not much of a Horror game type of a person, the most famous ones are generally for console and fuck consoles so I don't really have experiences with RE, SH and a bunch of other stuff that's supposed to be appropriate to know.

I did, however, play some on PC, like, say, Condemned, and I think that the better part of horror comes from managing scarce resources and knowing that you need to avoid some fights in order to make it through others. Oppressive atmosphere is also, naturally, important, as well as player's agency in it. It can be done in a fairly simple way, but the player must feel like they are in control of their character, and if they get brutally killed by something, it was purely their own fault, and not a script fucking them over. I also don't like jump scares and "punishing" for looting shit, like, for example, done in Doom 3, where you KNOW something will spawn the moment you pick up that ammo pack. Why not do it the other way around? That way you can assess potential benefit, and decide if you want to attack the monsters or not for it. "There's a rifle in that closet", you might learn, but next to the closet, you see shapes of two fairly nasty creatures that will likely leave you half-dead. Do you, or don't you? If you do, will the rifle enable you to survive your NEXT encounters, or will the injuries you sustain getting it fuck you over on the way? The element of unknown is there ANYWAY, but at least you don't expect a jumpscare every two minutes.

And yeah, occasionally it could be good to rob player of some resources on purpose. Throw a really nasty mob at them. Make them trade some old ammo for a better gun, then keep new ammo finds low for a while, yet make the new weapon be worth getting. You know, that kinda thing. Make the player worry about shit. Worrying about basic necessities + oppressive atmosphere + scary shit + occasional jump (it's not that they should be completely gone, but should be kept to a minimum) = pretty good horror game, I'd imagine.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

It's like talking to a zombie, mindlessly drudging through life as a contrarian know-it-all. Its wisdom cannot be shaken, for there is no room left for the outside view. Like FretRider, but in a games discussion. Once, it had the capacity for two-way communication. It has long since forgotten this skill however, and now exists solely because of its own instinct for self-preservation. It has no goal, it is the incarnation of aimless. Strangers who encounter it get disgusted and mad at first, but once they become familiar with it, they look upon it with pity.

Most hope it will at some point regain its lost humanity. A few, however, take sadistic delight in its torment. The only common rule, is that no one notices it for long. As much as it ignores its opposition, it is, in the larger scheme of things, ignored itself.

I tried to spare you such bullshit, but you just couldn't walk away.