I really blame the games industry as a whole for this. They keep making games with Space Marines as the protagonists, where their violence is presented as justified, when a lore-friendly space marine game should be like “No Russian” missions all the time and the resulting failure this causes to their Empire. This constant “whitewashing” of the lore, is what has attracted a ton of people.
I would LOVE to see a WH40k setting where the space marines are lore-accurate murdering an entire multi-billion hive-city for some minor heresy by a few thousand of the people on the 925th-sub-basement, and you’re playing random ganger Scumface Mc Spikearms who’s just trying to survive.
yeah, agreed. But Rogue Trader was remarkably on brand.
There were a LOT of parts where you basically had to decide the life and death of tens to hundreds of thousands. And often, the ethical thing was NOT the in-game right choice. For example, you could allow refugees aboard, it gets you nothing, but some of them will try to sabotage you. If you kill them all, you even get piety points for killing (some) heretics.
I recall one of the developer replying to a comment that said “If I’m evil, I get cool items, if I’m good, I get nothing, why is that?” and they replied with “If you’re doing it for a rewards, you’re not really being good, are you now?”
A Warhammer game. Being good is meant to be hard and I never consider evil options any more in games because they are just stupid when there is no reason to do it.
The Line was an anti-shooter, in the sense that it felt like a generic third-person shooter while constantly hammering the “you shouldn’t be having fun playing this because war is awful and full of atrocities” messaging. It was actually a fairly decent critique of the shooters that were prevalent when the game was developed. It came out when games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Red Dead Redemption were dominating the third-person shooter market, while the FPS market was dominated by Halo and COD.
Eh, I feel the message of Spec Ops was really sabotaged by the poor in-game systems.
There’s a mission where you have to defend a point, and you get the option to drop white phosphorus. But that mission is really easy, and you can easily play it for hours and hours, killing an infinite number of enemies. It doesn’t progress without pushing the button.
And then it berates you, the player, for pushing the button.
This feels really weird to me. I can see the point in the distance, but it really doesn’t work for me, since you can obviously just murder people till eternity as well.
And the game has several hidden “better ways”, like shooting the rope at the hanging, where it will reward you for doing it better. But it doesn’t have that option elsewhere, like the white phosphorus option.
Honestly, there’s a big disconnect between some of the scenes, and the heavyhanded message.
Contrast it with “no Russian”, which is a map that’s offered with zero commentary, letting you shoot unarmed civilians, but not punishing you at all if you don’t. And no matter what you do, the end result is the same. That’s a system that fits with everything in the game, it doesn’t have to swing a message in your face, and it doesn’t have to break with normal gameplay to insert elements required for the message.
See, I always thought this comparison falls flat, because No Russian and Spec Ops both give you the same amount of choice - either you complete the mission or not - and both give you no alternative way to proceed and no way to prevent it other than close the game. That Spec Ops makes you push buttons for the bad thing to happen rather than allow you to chicken out and be a passive rather than active participant is a point in it’s favour.
I always hear people talk about the white phosphorus part of the game, but the game doesn’t give you a choice there. I much prefer the parts where you are actually given a choice. The one that I remember the best is the civilians, you don’t have to kill them and I just fired a warning shot and they quickly dispersed. Apparently some people will gun them down.
You hear people talk about it, because it’s so bad and jarring and forced. People keep bringing up specops as some great writing inversion of a shooter trope, when it really just doesn’t get what agency is.
If you don’t give a player agency, you can’t then berate them for doing something wrong, because they didn’t actually do a thing. The phosphorous part of the game is a thing you don’t get a say in, but the game blames you as a player.
It’s like me blaming you for reading the word phosphorus, when you had basically no choice in that.
If you don’t give agency, you can only ever blame the character. And the writer made the characters, not the player.
Maybe that’s kind of the point? Both the player and the character chose to be there in the first place and civilian casualties are accepted as an inevitable during war.
The article discusses this; basically the video games want you to at least slightly like the protagonist you’re playing as, which means they can’t entirely be the monstrous caricatures they were designed to be.
I don’t get it why not though, Spec Ops The Line was not a technical marvel or an outstanding gameplay experience even for its time, but we are still talking about it for its message.
Dude, you can genetically modify a race to live shorter lives, taste good and make them more subservient and weaker. That shit is beyond genocide. From chattel to cattle.
I really blame the games industry as a whole for this. They keep making games with Space Marines as the protagonists, where their violence is presented as justified, when a lore-friendly space marine game should be like “No Russian” missions all the time and the resulting failure this causes to their Empire. This constant “whitewashing” of the lore, is what has attracted a ton of people.
I would LOVE to see a WH40k setting where the space marines are lore-accurate murdering an entire multi-billion hive-city for some minor heresy by a few thousand of the people on the 925th-sub-basement, and you’re playing random ganger Scumface Mc Spikearms who’s just trying to survive.
Apropos , the Necromunda video game was such a disappointment :(
yeah, agreed. But Rogue Trader was remarkably on brand.
There were a LOT of parts where you basically had to decide the life and death of tens to hundreds of thousands. And often, the ethical thing was NOT the in-game right choice. For example, you could allow refugees aboard, it gets you nothing, but some of them will try to sabotage you. If you kill them all, you even get piety points for killing (some) heretics.
I recall one of the developer replying to a comment that said “If I’m evil, I get cool items, if I’m good, I get nothing, why is that?” and they replied with “If you’re doing it for a rewards, you’re not really being good, are you now?”
This is moon logic. Yes, that’s how it works in the real world, but you aren’t in the real world. You’re playing a game.
A Warhammer game. Being good is meant to be hard and I never consider evil options any more in games because they are just stupid when there is no reason to do it.
So a WH40K/Spec-Ops: The Line mashup.
The Line was an anti-shooter, in the sense that it felt like a generic third-person shooter while constantly hammering the “you shouldn’t be having fun playing this because war is awful and full of atrocities” messaging. It was actually a fairly decent critique of the shooters that were prevalent when the game was developed. It came out when games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Red Dead Redemption were dominating the third-person shooter market, while the FPS market was dominated by Halo and COD.
Eh, I feel the message of Spec Ops was really sabotaged by the poor in-game systems.
There’s a mission where you have to defend a point, and you get the option to drop white phosphorus. But that mission is really easy, and you can easily play it for hours and hours, killing an infinite number of enemies. It doesn’t progress without pushing the button.
And then it berates you, the player, for pushing the button.
This feels really weird to me. I can see the point in the distance, but it really doesn’t work for me, since you can obviously just murder people till eternity as well.
And the game has several hidden “better ways”, like shooting the rope at the hanging, where it will reward you for doing it better. But it doesn’t have that option elsewhere, like the white phosphorus option.
Honestly, there’s a big disconnect between some of the scenes, and the heavyhanded message.
Contrast it with “no Russian”, which is a map that’s offered with zero commentary, letting you shoot unarmed civilians, but not punishing you at all if you don’t. And no matter what you do, the end result is the same. That’s a system that fits with everything in the game, it doesn’t have to swing a message in your face, and it doesn’t have to break with normal gameplay to insert elements required for the message.
See, I always thought this comparison falls flat, because No Russian and Spec Ops both give you the same amount of choice - either you complete the mission or not - and both give you no alternative way to proceed and no way to prevent it other than close the game. That Spec Ops makes you push buttons for the bad thing to happen rather than allow you to chicken out and be a passive rather than active participant is a point in it’s favour.
I always hear people talk about the white phosphorus part of the game, but the game doesn’t give you a choice there. I much prefer the parts where you are actually given a choice. The one that I remember the best is the civilians, you don’t have to kill them and I just fired a warning shot and they quickly dispersed. Apparently some people will gun them down.
You hear people talk about it, because it’s so bad and jarring and forced. People keep bringing up specops as some great writing inversion of a shooter trope, when it really just doesn’t get what agency is.
If you don’t give a player agency, you can’t then berate them for doing something wrong, because they didn’t actually do a thing. The phosphorous part of the game is a thing you don’t get a say in, but the game blames you as a player.
It’s like me blaming you for reading the word phosphorus, when you had basically no choice in that.
If you don’t give agency, you can only ever blame the character. And the writer made the characters, not the player.
Maybe that’s kind of the point? Both the player and the character chose to be there in the first place and civilian casualties are accepted as an inevitable during war.
The article discusses this; basically the video games want you to at least slightly like the protagonist you’re playing as, which means they can’t entirely be the monstrous caricatures they were designed to be.
I don’t get it why not though, Spec Ops The Line was not a technical marvel or an outstanding gameplay experience even for its time, but we are still talking about it for its message.
Meanwhile stellaris exists with multiple different options for genocide.
Dude, you can genetically modify a race to live shorter lives, taste good and make them more subservient and weaker. That shit is beyond genocide. From chattel to cattle.