Spec Ops the Line

It's a good game, the gameplay itself may be bland, but the story hits it out of the park.
I like to use the following analogy:
Even if the pizza you just ate tasted bland, it was still a filling meal, and it will certainly not give you diarrhea.

Exactly, its a video game, to be a good game the gameplay needs to be more than "Serviceable". Its like saying "This is a great piece of music, but the instrumentation is shit.".

Also,

I don't think it was meant to make you feel bad… at least, I hope not because if that was the point they goofed. It was a decent story of how this character tried desperately to stick to his ideals and they only led him to his downfall until eventually he achieved the opposite of his initial goal and basically became a demon fueled by revenge… sort of like what was supposed to happen to Big Boss.

If you wanted your Snake becoming a monster game, then play it as one.

"Don't hurt 'em boss, they're just kids."

I just wish MGSV had Cecile turn up as the environmentalist NGO and would tell you where the capture cage animals were. Just boring having to look up shit online.

Bad on purpose is never a good excuse. You can subvert the players expectations while still delivering a gmae that's fun to play. Look at MGS2.

Binary Domain

Is this gaem good?
It looks like a generic cover based shooter like spec ops except with robots and red glowing "shoot me" points.

Generic gameplay, interesting setting and cheeky characters. You can pretty much beat the game by shooting almost everything in the legs.

Wouldn't good gameplay benefit the story more?

Child soldiers had to happen as it is integral to the story of MGS. V was always going to be soft with the topic.

Yes actually. Pretty decent. Nothing mind blowing, the AI can be pretty annoying at times with how friendlies will get in the way and blame you for it. A good little TPS.

Yeah but he did the whole rape things balls to the wall full throttle in GZ so I expected less pussy bullshit out of Kojimbles.

NieR

This game managed to somewhat deliver the story Spec Ops the Line could not.

Except the developers did not do that. They were told to do the gameplay they did, generic and cheap, so they took freedom with the story, which really couldn't have costed much.

>There are fans who genuinely believe this is what the game was trying to say

Are you sure they said that? Everything I heard from them said they basically had to make a military shooter since that's what THQ wanted, but tried to play to the team's strengths by building up the writing and level design.

Same. It didn't eclipse FEAR, Halo or GoW but I didn't exactly need it to.

Yes, killing sandniggers is more fun with good gameplay.

In a way, if you fully embrace their bullshit argument, Battlebored could be the best game ever given the fact that you can make the best moral choice by not buying this piece of shit and save $60.

Come on, there's no story in MGSV. A fanfiction at best. These days, Kojima makes games so he can fap at cosplay pictures of his characters.

Were you born in this century?

This too, I might be an edgy retard but I love blasting sand niggers, don't know how they could expect us to feel bad for those retards.

There were like three playable sequences in the game that were relevant to the story.
And who wants to craft their own story in an MGS game? It's not an RPG.

This is a type of role playing game afterall.

It blows Spec Ops to bits.

Oh come on. As if 3 wasn't the better game. Only the tanker chapter of 2 is any fun, the entire plant chapter is you controlling the opposite of Snake through the same 10 maps in between long cutscenes and codec sequences.

THQ basically wanted "CoD Killer 400: It's Gonna Work This Time". They also had to waste time on a multiplayer mode that was DOA on launch. The story was probably the only part of the game that the developers had free reign over.

So you are bitching about map design not gameplay? Or are you too stupid to even realize that? MGS2 gameplay was fucking golden. I bet you even played 3 only with the new came implemented anyway.

Yeah, they really fucked it up by not having an in-game choice and then going "duh you should just turn off the game".

Far Cry 4 did it : wait for the "crab rangoon" ending and nobody dies.

What SO:TL should have done is give the player two opportunities to turn back and leave the battlefield. Ironically, they even marked the perfect spots with their infamous STOP signs.

-> If you stop at the first, you have followed the orders you were given perfectly : recon the city, report back if you find survivors (even though you have to shoot them after they start shooting at you). This makes you a proper soldier.

-> If you stop at the second, you remove yourself from the city just before the point of no return, after which nothing good can possibly happen. This makes you a soldier with discipline issues but you meant well at every crossroad you encountered.

-> If you keep going after that, even though it is obvious that things are going to devolve into mass war crimes and pointless violence, *then* (and only then) the game can start calling you a murderous monster.

bait I finished this ok/ 10 shooter, and I have no clue what the story is all about except something like he went mad and didn't know what he was doing, which actually almost never happens to people in real life, unless they go to full psychosis, and become totally dysfunctional

what is the ending, then?

Walker starts out wanting to do his job and get out, but fueled by anger and not wanting to put the guilt he got from what he did on himself, he pushed it onto Konrad, who had long been dead. Trying to get "revenge" for this, he fights his way to the command station for the 33rd where he comes to the realization that everything after the White Phosphorous attack was changed in his mind to justify himself so he could feel like a hero. At that point you're given the option to shoot the hallucination of Konrad, shoot your own reflection, or let Konrad shoot you.

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It does but I meant that NieR itself isn't perfect either. A game that shows this sort of concept best would be one where all this shit is actually completely optional, but then of course it wouldn't be able to shove it in your face as much and people wouldn't notice it. I found this to actually be done very well on accident in 3D fallout games since it can be ambiguous as to whether human dudes you see in the distance are hostile or not, so I might attack them first to get the advantage only to realize that they were innocent people that didn't want to hurt me. There's also those garbage survival games like DayZ that do this to an even greater extent, but they have the unfortunate consequence of being completely shit so it doesn't matter.

I'm not talking about the "Will you accept the consequences of what you did, kill yourself or go full monster?" choice at the end which was fine, if boring and trite.

I'm talking about the actual moral choice that the devs themselves put forward ("Will you deliberately commit horrible acts?"). Their answer is to stop the game or never start it at all, but non-software choices are dumb in this case.

I like this quite a bit and I think these would have redeemed the game almost entirely.

What it could use after that would be some actual fun gameplay to make you enjoy shooting dudes kinda like how Hotline Miami was all about making it as exhilarating as possible to brutally murder people to fast music, colorful visuals, and fast/tight gameplay but it constantly asks you if pure fun justifies the killing of other people.

Then you misread the game, and this happens every time a Spec Ops thread comes up. It's a condemnation of linear game design.

Look at the ending again. If Walker is a player surrogate in that scene then Konrad is a developer surrogate. Terrible things happened there, but who is to blame? The player who committed awful acts or the developer who gave them zero choice but to do so? Shooting Walker there is the equivalent of saying "Yes I'm a monster, every critic of mine in the game is right". Shooting Konrad is saying "No, I'm not a bad person, and if you'd just let me pick a peaceful option then I would go do it."
That's why the game follows up with that in the epilogue, where you can either have a final, hard fight or you can just give up the gun. That choice is you proving you wanted what you and Walker gave out at the game for not giving you more often - a choice.

The game doesn't actually think you're a monster, it just makes you want to get caught in a cognitive dissonance. This is both for the PTSD theme running through the game and for the argument through example that linearity can backfire on the player when the narrative fails.

I thought Hotline Miami was about how a game didn't need to make narrative sense so long as it was fun and played well?

b…b..bu..b….but why didn't they put in a press X to not use white phosphorus why is a videogame loading screen saying something bad about me reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

sage for shitpost

so what would shooting him and going home represent?

also, the end where you end up basically becoming Big Boss was the best.

Also, does the dialogue change towards the end of the game for getting hit and reloading?

Shooting Konrad and going home? It represents what I said - you can take the other option if it exists.
The lead designer did an interesting interview on it. He feels like violence in games isn't explored interestingly enough, and wants to see games that either find ways to do the regular routine that we know and love with means other than action, or ones that embrace the nature of their mechanics. Kinda like why Drakengard games have the kinds of characters it does, according to Toko - because he can't rationalise the violent things they do otherwise.

Yes, and it's one of my favourite changes.

Oh damn, is there proof of this happening? I didn't catch that one, same with the billboards or the tallies of sniper's kills.

I genuinely liked the story and the graphics were 100% distilled scenery porn. Game had all kinds of neat little touches and details everywhere.

Turret sections were insufferable though, holy fucking shit. I don't know if they're a staple of TPS games or what because I never played TPS games, but the turret sections in Spec Ops were bull fucking pussy.

Why do you sound like every single poster crying about morality?

Not that I've seen, but given the easter eggs in this game I wouldn't be surprised if it were true.

It pays to not waste 2000 hours of your life playing online shooters, i guess.

I'm amazed people though the gameplay was generic, i don't understand what sort of gimmick they were expecting it.

Drakengard 1 I actually had more fun with, shame it emulates poorly

3 on the other hand…

MGS2 did it infinitely better and even with its many, many flaws, sincerely doubt that it will ever be touched.

Undertale also toyed with this concept, but still only has the only option being to literally stop playing. At least Undertale made it part of the game's narrative. MGS2 still best.

Literally this but fags still insist on sucking the dev's cock

Undertale, from what I've read, still has a bullshit way. Without the fan patch your only options are to get good endings forever or bad endings forever. Doesn't make for a replayable game.

Undertale's lucky in that it's a game that only wants to be played more or less once. If MGS2 is railing against a lack of independent thought and Spec Ops is condemning narratives that bend over backwards to justify actions in linear games, then Undertale is begging completionists to give it a break and learn when to let go of something they loved. Ironic, ain't it?

Whelp, I'm playing it again. It really is neat that, even though they had to make a generic shooter they made the best of it by putting all that care into everything else.

I guess it's just that it could have defined itself a little more than being a slightly clunkier Gears of War clone. It didn't make the gameplay bad, but it wasn't really anything to write home about… though to be completely honest, I don't know what I'd have made the game.

Didn't they say the game's a critical satire of modern FPS? That would explain it.

kind of unrelated, but after I do another playthrough I'm thinking about jumping to Far Cry 2 seeing as I've heard it's another surprisingly good game with a morally ambiguous story… is it worth playing and is it a good game to go to next?

A lot of people say FC2 is shit but I replay it regularly. I wouldn't say its morally ambiguous and the ending is definitely shit but The Jackal is an interesting character if you bother to track down his interview tapes. The gameplay however is pretty solid, I'd say its the best Far Cry game, tied with Blood Dragon. I really want to see another game like FC2 with a bit more polish but that'll never happen

Well alright, guess this is up next for me then. Guess I'll just have to deal with the ending, but the stuff up to the ending is decent right? I know this one is actually supposed to feel like a survival game which was lost in the later entries.

Polite sage for off topic

Going through first FC2 playthrough, I miss Josip already.

Yes, how indeed.

Definitely play it on the highest difficulty. It can feel tedious on lower difficulties but when you can die very quickly, you play it a bit more realistically which makes it more enjoyable. The survival aspect can come from scavenging weapons but honestly, if you're not wasteful with your diamonds you won't need to pick up enemy weapons. It's basically a mercenary sim in a way, you can buy whatever gear suits your play style.

Also if you have the fortunes pack, I recommend you don't use the free weapons it comes with. You'll find them in the gun store weapon rooms, they can give you a bit too much of an upper-hand too early on.

I don't think the gameplay is bad, necessarily, the game was short enough that I didn't get bored with it.

Maybe it's because I played it on the PC and it has a bad 360 port? I heard the bodies FUCKING FADE on the xbox, which would destroy a lot of the impact for me.

I'm not sure if the devs were cruel enough to do some of those things.

Gotcha, I appreciate the heads up and will take your advice. Getting pretty excited to finally play it to be honest.

I think the bodies still fade in the PC version, still, I can't imagine having to play the thing with a controller. The hitboxes on your enemies are pretty unforgiving.

I don't remember them fading. I've only played it once, I did the whole thing in one sitting I'm probably gonna play it again tonight because of this thread but it might be a graphical option.

The 2deep4me metacommentary would have worked much better if there was a clear option not to use the ebul methods, even if it lead to elaborate game over screen (the main character fucks off/kills himself) or to a fight only a turboautist could hope to overcome.

"Haha, you played the game" just doesn't cut it.

see

Doing something straight isn't critizing it.

I see you just have a hateboner for this game, I'll stop replying so you can't shitpost this thread into the ground.

Spec ops story: "war is bad"

Dude war bad.

hotline miami was about the folly of trusting commies

It's a bit deeper than that m8.

Hunted: The Demons' Forge did this. There were places with this silvery goop shit that got quickly assaulted by hordes of fairly tough monsters. If you drank the goop, it sent you into a special mode where you one-shot literally everything and went through the section very easily. However, the more you drank it, the more it changed your character's appearance (getting silver eyes and veins and shit like tht) and even changed the consequent cutscenes (find dying guy that tries to warn you about something, and suddenly for no apparent reason just kill him). If you drank even once, you got a bad ending.

The fact that you think MGS2 was fun to play clearly shows you never fought the RAYs

I had completely forgotten about this game. I wrote it off back in the day due to still putting weight on journalists opinions. Is it any good? Would it be worth pirating or were the journalists right about it being a tad mediocre?

I really wish niggers would stop defending this dogshit game by saying the gameplay–the fucking foundation of what makes a goddamn video game–is "serviceable" or "bland" and that it somehow gets off the hook thanks to a secondary attribute like "story".

If your comprehension of the English language is so shit you actually think "mediocre" or "bland" equates to being "good" or "exceptional" you have no business saying this game's story is good because you don't know what fucking words mean.

Spec Ops is Overrated. its a shitty TPS with the gimmick ending that isnt nearly as good as games have done it before.

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It was a linear action RPG with two characters that you could switch between (a tanky warrior dude and an elven archer qt). There were some side quests, but mostly collectables like saving villagers (centered around finding secret spots in the mostly linear maps), but all that was, naturally, just details while the combat was the main thing. Personally, I really liked sniping everything with the bow. The story was actually good with several nice twists, and I can't say I was bored.

Overall, it's everything you'd expect from a linear action RPG with some extra shit on top (switching between characters, story, and some other small stuff), and that's about it. Don't expect anything too innovative, don't expect to fall in love with it (although the elven lass was pretty hot, IIRC), but it's still a relatively fun way to spend several hours. Worth a pirate, I'd say.

The ending actually addresses that.

Gotcha, I'll go ahead and download that as well. I appreciate the rundown.

go back to Polygon, Summer Holla Forums

"It's bad on PURPOSE!"

see

no, I mean that is actually something you can throw back on the "developers". They are telling you it is all your fault but you have the ability to say "fuck you, you made me do this" by shooting them in the face and getting 3 different endings depending on how you play and what you actually choose in the epilogue.

For something that probably didn't receive a lot of budget that's pretty neat imo.

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its still fucking stupid. They couldve at least made the gimmick subtle, like MGS and SH3 did

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They were clearly muslims.

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you mean a short but entertaining mindfuck?

so is mgs5, your point beeing? the stealth is bordeline broken, the shooting is boring, the endless possibilities your supposed to have are 90% shit and having to repeat the same missions over and over again is just pathetic.
spec ops the line had even worse gameplay, but at least it didnt pretend to be the most innovate game of all time.

what? just because the game barely had a story itself doesnt mean the story is now what the player makes of what little there is. it just means that there isnt much story. not that i would mind if the gameplay was good, crysis 1 is to this day one of my favorite games, but the gameplay was alright at best.

Pointing out the flaws of MGS5 still doesn't make Spec Ops any less shit.

wut

I never said innocent.

It was railroading but I felt in the context of the story it made sense and I appreciated the way the worked the gameplaye (for better and worse) into the story, which is more than most fucking stories do these days.
Most players probably wouldn't see the big white smear, remember the civvies being taken a few levels ago and connect the dots. I went into the game spoiled and I only connected them just as/after I clicked on them.
I know this is going to sound>>9981811
pretentious but I do think the devs were trying to get mileage with the fashion for characters being marketed as THE PLAYER and AN EXTENSION OF THE PLAYER and the "THE CHARACTER IS YOOOOOU!".
I felt that fell a bit flat though: Walker wasn't a blank slate and I always saw him as a separate entity to me so I never really got the whole "It's your fault!" thing supposedly being aimed at me. For people who like to do that kind of thing thought, Walker going "This wasn't my fault, I had no choice!" is what the player arguably thinks. Heck, you yourself say "They should have given me options! I had no choice!"
They do eventually give the player a choice though; some are a deliberate 'fuck you' to games that supposedly give you choices (hello Mass Effect III ending) and then several at the end game. I always though 'killing Konrad' was choosing to blame the devs for the events of the game, and then handing over your guns in the epilogue was the option to avoid violence. They railroad you along and make you kill everything, walker (and depending on the players inclinations to self insert, them too) getting blamed for it all.
Yet at the end of the game they give you an option to stop it all, stop the violence: the very first time you're given a 'meaningful' choice.

I thought that was extra credits having their heads up their own arses again.

but spec ops isnt shit at all. its a generic tps with a well told and intersting story and an increadible amount of detail put into it.
mgs5 on the other hand is an incoherent half finished mess with a few fun parts somewhere between all the bland shit.

Fancy word for shit.

This is the dumbest shit I ever heard. Spec Ops was a functioning TPS that was memorable due to the attention to detail surrounding it. Games are more than just the fucking gameplay you mongoloid and if the gameplay isn't utterly broken, then it doesn't distract from the overall package.

I bet you're the kind of retard that thinks MGS4 had bad gameplay. MGS V was absolutely atrocious when it came to gameplay and AI. Just because the controls have been streamlined doesn't mean the gameplay improved.

Honestly, if there's one thing that grinds my nuts more than MGSV just being a massive letdown it's the 'it had good gameplay/the best in the series' meme.

are you a fucking retard? Have you never played Chaos Theory?

oh I didnt read that part. you are a retard.

i think you are missing the point.
there are games that are good because of their story, while the gameplay is bad.
there are games that are good because of their gameplay while the story is bad.
a certain kind of person on v will say that gameplay and "fun" is the only thing that ever matters and they are wrong.
retards in gaming "journalism" will tell you that story and "emotion" is the only thing that ever matters and they are wrong too.
by their logic any given mario game would be shit.
by your logic games like planescape torment or fallout new vegas would be shit.

spec ops is a game that is played for its story and the context that it gives to the gameplay makes a mechanicly generic tps fun to play.

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They are.

very nice use of memearrows, you truely dismantled my argument :^)

so you do believe that gameplay is the only thing that matteres in a game? thats just silly.

I see you are a man of shit taste.

Read a fucking book once in your lives if stories of video games seem to have any value to you.

There's gotta be a real fucking good story/writing for me to give mediocre gameplay a pass, if it's at the very least smooth and bugless. I can very easily overlook a garbage story if I have fun with the game's fundamental component, the gameplay.

Honestly, a game should strive to be the best in all regards, or at the very least in its gameplay.

A shitty game for atheist nihilists.

Maybe that just means that most video games should get better writers, and not that they should be cut entirely, you moronic piece of shit

Saying that games can play like shit and still be good is not an argument. It is a statement. Backed by nothing and objectively wrong by the nature of games.

Let's correct this to

Are you sure the devs were lecturing you? Are you sure they weren't scolding themselves even more?

indeed, lets scrap the entire rpg genre because nothing will come of it anyways.
seriously though, there is a difference between reading a story and playing a story. in a good rpg gameplay and story will work together as something better than the sum of its parts. gothic 1 for example has somewhat shitty combat, especialy at the beginning, but it fits so well into the world and story that it still is a fun to play. as another example have witcher 3. the combat is much better than gothic 1, but because the world building and progression isnt anywhere near as well done i didnt enjoy it at all, swiched to easy and just rushed through the story.
its not just the quality of the gameplay and story as seperate entities, but how they work together that makes a great rpg.
the point is, if i want to read a good story i'll read a book, if i want to "experience" a good story i'll play a game.

that balance is different for everyone i guess.

as a general rule, yes.

dont use words like objective if you dont know what they mean.

You can talk until you are blue in the face about how shit Undertale is but at least it know's how to handle making the player feel like shit for their actions. First off, literally everyone in the game can be beaten without killing them, so its 100% the players choice if they do. Secondly, the biggest "You're a monster" moments are in the neutral route when you're killing people but dont have the heart to go the full 8 miles and kill EVERYONE, whereas with genocide route, it stops going "You're a bad person" and starts potraying both the protag and the player as some big ancient evil BBEG-type character. The neutral endings are the most depressing ones because you leave people who have been hurt by your actions.

There's also a realism mod that you can get off of ModDB that makes the weapons a bit more damaging since enemies have a habit of soaking up 7.62 NATO like it was from a BB gun.

It's one of those games that still looks absolutely beautiful more than half a decade later, I doubt the console versions would hold up at all. The foliage and water effects are done very well. Admittedly, these screenshots are with an ENB injector, with nothing really turned up besides saturation.

Fuck off, reddit.

you spend three posts saying nothing at all and getting angry about it. maybe its time to turn off the computer.

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arguing with you is both pointless and funny.

Who here wished they could have used white phosphorous more in Spec Ops The Line? There should be more spilling of Blood for the Blood God!

You kill literally the entire population of Dubai in this game. Everyone in this game who is there to kill dies.
I don't get why the willie pete is more traumatising to people than literally everything that comes afterwards; that was just the start of the psychological downward curve, which takes some serious dips from then on.

B-BUT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, SO DEEP! I AM DOING SOMETHING A GAME TOLD ME TO DO TO WIN IT! IT'S JUST LIKE FIRING REAL GUNS!

Spec Ops is just Heart of Darkness the game, so why do you have an issue with one and not the other.

The gameplay was not spectacular but perfectly serviceable, and the other stuff was good. I really don't know why some people get triggered by it so much.

I too love Apocalypse Now.

gameplay is not worth mentioning, I thought it was an interesting experiment in terms of story but from what I remember they pulled their punches like every western game pulls it punches when it starts to talk about america, and the deep state, and all the shit certain unelected people get up to on the regular.

its odd that they felt the need to do so considering the scenario was beyond abstract, but they did nonetheless, its always a "bad apple", no one ever actually condemns or even shows how this shit is institutionalized, how secrecy is probably the most important rule by which our nation functions

America is fine. its always a bad guy, and the bad guy gets defeated.

sure, the "hero" may be a broken man at the end, loss, trials and tribulations, etc p.p, but its still the same pattern again and again, people that compare this to Full Metal Jacket or even something similarly abstract like apocalypse now are talking out of their ass imo(yes ive seen plenty of these comparisons)

I dont know if its even possible to make an honest game in this vein from a western liberal perspective, there are too many levels of shit, and it will end up being unintentional propaganda at best which is probably what spec ops is

But the main bad guy (besides Walker) was a CIA operative who wanted to kill everyone in Dubai to cover up how the US military screwed up the situation?

I seem to remember a few cutscenes dedicated specifically to the fact that he is acting alone, no agency oversight.

This is what always bothers me, it feels like everyone in the west is deathly afraid to admit that there are committees, mechanisms, think tanks, look-away lists, collusion with organized crime, entire off the books organizations dedicated to doing this kind of shit, its almost NEVER a "lone guy"

I know the "lone wolf madman" is the heart of darkness thing, but even there many argue that Conrad was implying there was more to the kurtz character than that, and if you read up on Leon Rom whom the character I tend to agree

Conrad also wrote "the Secret Agent", which is pretty much an antithesis to what im complaining about(its about how intelligence agencies coerce/manipulate useful retards to blow things up which they then blame on their enemies, he wrote this in 1900)

I guess what im saying is Jospeh Conrad would have probably sneered at this in terms of intent, so you cant just say

like a guy above did

I just looked him up the bad guys name in "The Line" is literally "Konrad", interesting…

long story short, when you go the "Lone wolf" route with a story about intelligence agencies and all their fuckery, it instantly devalues your criticism dragging it down to an action movie level, there are probably fucking Steven Seagal movies with more depth than this, at least on paper(didnt he do one about Iran/contra haw haw)

holy shit its even worse than lone wolf theory, wow how did i miss this i did fucking play the game:

Konrad doesnt even exist, hes a fucking hallucination of walkers warped psyche, the real Konrad was a good guy he dindu nuffin, and he killed himself after 1000+ people died during an evacuation…

make of that what you will but it drags this game down even further in terms of what it is always lauded for

But is the gameplay really shit, or is it just the mediocre cover shooter?

Honestly I don't understand why Uncharted is praised compared to this in that sense at least.

Me neither. The gameplay's alright, it's just not god tier, and I enjoyed that on its own. I particularly liked that the squadmates were actually useful. The only honest fault I can think of is that it's not so easy to dive into cover sometimes because of the button layout, but that frustration wasn't exactly tiring. The team show a lot of their ability in the level design and in building the experience around the gameplay, to the point where every scene and dialogue is built around the game itself.

Honestly, I think the whole "GAMEPLAY'S SHIT WOOOOW" rant comes from crybabies who got triggered by how the rest of the game made them feel and are just looking for things to discredit the game on. People are too inclined to give them that since the standalone mechanics aren't as good or fresh as the rest of the game.

see