Let's Sperg Did Spec Ops The Line Ruin Gaming?

[Dave.]

"The first time ever in a long time games could be respected as art!"

I don't like Spec Ops The Line. I never had and probably never will. In fact, I have a personal, probably unwarranted hatred for Spec Ops The Line because I feel like it was the very moment this game got famous, gaming as whole really went to shit. Why do I say this? Because ever since the game came out, and you could probably blame Hideous Kojimbus as well, there has been an epidemic of pretentious, far up their own ass game developers who believe that "deconstruction" or "post modern critiques" of gaming genres or gaming conventions is somehow smart or artistically stimulating. No, making a platformer a commentary about the struggles of the modern world is not a smart critique of platformers as a genre, it's a pretentious showboat about your boring life trying to turn something with the primary goal of challenging a user into an art piece which, in my eyes, looks fucking ridiculous. No, making a shooter that's deliberately unruly, tough to play, and repetitive doesn't offer up a critique of bro shooters or how war is an inhuman atrocity, it's taking a product made primarily to challenge the players reflexes and coordination and trying to make it an art piece about the ills of war or something.


Oh but apparently this game is so smart because it shows in shooter games you don't actually have a choice! You don't have agency over what you're doing! And? You wrote this shit pile of a story where I bomb a bunch of civilians because of a mistake I'm RAILROADED into making. You made me do this at the behest of your programming and your game design that you deliberately implemented. I did this because I was told to by you to do it. You don't get to call me a bad person because I was "just following orders" or not questioning superiors because a game can't allow me to have that agency because ITS A FUCKING VIDEO GAME. There's only so much interaction you can give in a video game and I understand that when I'm playing Call of Duty or Battlefield. I don't have a choice because this is how it's programmed. You don't have any other choices because the devs didn't program them in. You're deliberately not given any agency.


But anyhow, that's my little spergout about Spec Ops The Line. A game I just don't like. I'm curious to know what people think about it because I really can't stand hipster post modern critiques and deconstructions of video game genres like this game was doing at the time.

 

[Tenshi Eating A Corn Dog!]

I think too much of its popularity is retroactive to have it be responsible for the fart sniffers hanging around in the industry. I'd pin it on a lot of the indy developer fart huffers from earlier years like Johnathan Blow. I think the indy developer scene was the real start of the whole games as art movement.

 

[M3xus]

All this "deconstructing mechanics" has been going on before Spec Ops, though I feel it deserves every bit of hate it gets.

Before that it was Drakengard. Strip out the baby-eating cannibal, the pedophilia, ultra-racism, and doomsday cult and the game's message boils down to "people that play Dynasty Warriors and jump through hoops to get everything are weird". We know, Yoko Taro, you don't have to tell us. The only reason he doesn't get shit on is because Nier and Nier: Automata wound up being fun.

 

[complete freak]

You WILL play the quirky post-modern earthbound inspired indie RPG that's an allegory for depression or some historical tragedy like the Armenian genocide, and you WILL like it.

 

[Targeted Individual]

I don't have a choice because this is how it's programmed. You don't have any other choices because the devs didn't program them in. You're deliberately not given any agency.

Nigger you bought the game and put the disk on the console, the devs didn't force you to do it.
You had the agency to chose not to play violent videogames, but you chose to do it anyways.
I think that the point this game tries to make is similar to that of Hotline Miami 1&2, but infinitely worse because Hotline Miami 1&2 are objectively the best games ever made. But I don't know, I didn't play Spec Ops.

 

[Frank(en) Castle]

It’s not directly linked to Spec Ops. As said above a lot of the games reverence is being applied retroactively. When it released it was lambasted for being a cheap wanna be COD.

I also believe people are reading too deeply into the war crimes section. It wasn’t a meta commentary on all the war crimes a typical FPS character commits. Your player character has just gone fucking crazy. So then the game makes you walk through the charred corpses and is like “damn bro look at dis shit. That’s wild, Walker’s lost his shit huh?”.

Same shit with Nolan North voicing Walker. “Wow what a brilliant subversion. Get the guy who’s made a career out of voicing the action protagonist to voice a war criminal ”

Yeah or maybe they just hired Nolan North because he was a well known and well liked voice actor and they hoped that would help shift copies.

What I fucking despise about it and you can find this on TV tropes, is the idea that “the only way to win Spec Ops the line is to put the controller down and refuse to commit war crimes ”.

My response to that would be “Fuck you. I didn’t buy this game to stop playing it 1/2 to 3/4 of the way through.”

 

[Pissmaster]

Trust me, people were gonna get faggy over games with or without Spec Ops. Earthbound had a crazy internet following as far back as I can remember.

Long before all the indie hippies started showing up, there were already spookypasta fan theories about how Giygas was a fetus. Nerds were cooming themselves over that interview where Shigestato Itoi apparently said Giygas' dialog was based on a rape scene that he accidentally saw as a child when he wandered into the wrong movie theater.

Oh but apparently this game is so smart because it shows in shooter games you don't actually have a choice! You don't have agency over what you're doing! And? You wrote this shit pile of a story where I bomb a bunch of civilians because of a mistake I'm RAILROADED into making. You made me do this at the behest of your programming and your game design that you deliberately implemented. I did this because I was told to by you to do it.

Even that was wearing thin when Spec Ops was new, because of those Telltale games that were advertised with the concept that your choices changed the entire story, when most of your decisions just changed the next few lines of dialog, but came around to the same point at which you'd wind up anyway if you went with the other.

Then again, Spec Ops doing that was interesting at the time, considering all the disposable military shooters that were just to be taken at face value, and it looked like just another one. It was a funny rug pull, and a clever idea to do something different with the franchise. At the time. Its now been 11 years, and that is now very, very trite.

 

[The Cunting Death]

Before that it was Drakengard. Strip out the baby-eating cannibal, the pedophilia, ultra-racism, and doomsday cult and the game's message boils down to "people that play Dynasty Warriors amd jump through hoops to get everything are weird". We know, Yoko Taro, you don't have to tell us. The only reason he doesn't get shit on is because Nier and Nier: Automata wound up being fun.

Even the original Nier was janky as all fuck. It only got a cult following because its story was really fucking good. It's why the remake of the original had its gameplay completely realtered.

 

[The Cunting Death]

Even that was wearing thin when Spec Ops was new, because of those Telltale games that were advertised with the concept that your choices changed the entire story, when most of your decisions just changed the next few lines of dialog, but came around to the same point at which you'd wind up anyway if you went with the other.

I miss when Telltale was known for Sam and Max and the Strong Bad games. Those were actually fun.

 

[JesusChristDenton]

All the sperging about the White Phosphorus scene and how "it's the players fault" pretty much falls apart when you realise that the player is railroaded into it. I would understand the impact if it was a multiple choice scenario, where you could try to sneak through the camp or just go in guns blazing and hope you don't die, but no. You have no choice but to use White Phosphorus, and you have no choice but to listen to the game lecture you on how much of an evil selfish little fuck you are.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Spec Ops was hyped heavily for what amounted to "gamers are evil for playing video games", which would come full force a year afterwards when GaymerGate happened and gaming journalism died for all intents and purpose.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

No

I bought the game at launch. Very few people gave a shit. Normies completely ignored the game. The few gamers who praised it were often mocked because the game, at it's core, is a generic as fuck shooter. Edit: I also remember people who praised the story being laughed at for taking it too seriously and finding depth where there wasn't any.

I liked the game for what it was, but I enjoy generic shooters for some reason. I don't remember anyone really "giving a shit" until video essay faggots started gaining prominence in the past few years.

The Last of Us is far more responsible for how faggy the AAA game industry has become than Spec Ops.

 

[Marian]

The game does consider switching the game off as a viable choice because it does repeatedly tell you you can just stop playing in loading screens. yes it's huffing it's own farts but i did find it novel it's like the only game you can fight us army that aren't nondescript evil mercenary units.

 

[JohnnyG]

You wrote this shit pile of a story where I bomb a bunch of civilians because of a mistake I'm RAILROADED into making.

You have no choice but to use White Phosphorus, and you have no choice but to listen to the game lecture you on how much of an evil selfish little fuck you are.

I've been watching a playthrough recently because of the White Phosphorus level, and comparisons to the MW2 "No Russian" airport level.

I didn't really understand the (manufactured?) outrage over the MW2 one, because regardless of your thoughts on war, they were pretty clever about it:
- You don't have to shoot any civilians, and nobody ever tells you to or notices if you don't
- You don't even have to shoot the armed security, as your comrades will take care of them

So if you join in the massacre it's your own doing, and

Spoiler: the ending

having them know all along you were an infiltrator and leaving your body behind to be found

was a clever twist.

 

[The Last Stand]

Then again, Spec Ops doing that was interesting at the time, considering all the disposable military shooters that were just to be taken at face value, and it looked like just another one. It was a funny rug pull, and a clever idea to do something different with the franchise. At the time. Its now been 11 years, and that is now very, very trite.

I'd argue that the oversaturation of military shooters after CoD4 was a result of Spec Ops: The Line's meddling reception.

 

[The Early 2000s]

I would much, much prefer games that understood and used the gaming medium for their storytelling like Spec Ops did, than the movie-game slop tsunami we have now.

...I like Spec Ops a lot, I don't care if I seem like a pretentious ass for it

 

[GNU Abyss]

All the sperging about the White Phosphorus scene and how "it's the players fault" pretty much falls apart when you realise that the player is railroaded into it. I would understand the impact if it was a multiple choice scenario, where you could try to sneak through the camp or just go in guns blazing and hope you don't die, but no. You have no choice but to use White Phosphorus, and you have no choice but to listen to the game lecture you on how much of an evil selfish little fuck you are.

This really is its biggest sin. The rest was the fault of all the reviewer faggots fluffing the game up. It's doubly confusing because they make interesting choices in other places. When the crowd of angry Arabs starts to push you and your squad, you can simply shoot in the air and they will disperse, massacre avoided. Another interesting moment happens right after you crash the water truck. A guy is stuck under it and the flames are reaching him. You have a single bullet. Mercy kill him or, if you miss (which is what I did accidentally), he starts cursing you and dies in agony as the flames take him. These are really the only things I remember from The Line, the rest was passable.

 

[Pissmaster]

The Last of Us is far more responsible for how faggy the AAA game industry has become than Spec Ops.

I can get behind that. The Last of Us felt so astroturfed when it launched. Like I just woke up to a deluge of retards clamoring over how it's the best game ever made, which felt really weird at the time, considering it appeared to be yet another zombie game. But it was a zombie game released in 2013, a point in time when the whole zombie fad was wearing thin, and countless zombie games were already out. Dead Rising was already seven years old at the time.

But, I bought it anyway, and sure enough, it was total garbage. Tedious and not fun to play at all. I don't understand why anyone enjoyed it.

 

[Absolutego]

It's definitely a 2deep4u hipster meta retelling of Heart of Darkness, but I don't think it's imitators were nearly legion enough for its impact to really negatively impact the entire scene. It was part of an existing wave of deconstructivist/post-modern critiques of video games, not the progenitor of the trend.

 

[Merton J. Dingle]

I thought it was fun and that the game had a much better story than most other 7th gen games, but at the end of the day virtually every video game story is just a rehash of the type of material found in comics and pulp novels: harmless, but not the only kind of stories that you want to consume if you want to be a well-rounded person.