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Man, Spec Ops was bullshit. (Spoilers for Spec Ops and Dishonored below, spoiler tags seem to be wonky.)
||I'm just going to bring up one particular moment. In the madness arc, Walker comes across two men, and is told to execute one of them for various crime reasons (one man stole, the other man killed someone else trying to stop him, don't really recall, the details don't matter.) Both men are being covered by snipers who will shoot you instead if you don't make the choice. I, like many people his this and of course opened up on the covering snipers, and was able to get past them eventually, albeit with one of the two men still getting shot in the process (but not by me), and so I called that good enough and moved on. Later in the game, you get flashbacks to show how crazy you have been, and when you get to that bridge scene, there are no snipers and both man are long dead, and as you are speaking, not to the voice on the radio, but the voice in your head, as your squadmates grow visibly concerned.
But if this was a hallucination, I couldn't have been shot by it, could I? The game does not actually commit to having a real-world underlying layer and recognizing through the lens of mechanics what is real and what isn't. So, my read on Spec Ops: the Line is also malicious naivety; the correct interpretation is that everything happened, that djinn and demons stalk Dubai and blatantly supernatural stuff happens, and that "Fuck off, evil spirit using Konrad's voice, I'm not crazy and you can't gaslight me into thinking I am with some obviously-fake visions.", followed by being picked up by your fellow soldiers, is the true and correct ending.
I will absolutely defend the High Chaos ending of Dishonored, though. Yes, when Satan, who is causing a zombie plague spread by magic human-devouring rats, appears to you in durance and offers you power and revenge on your enemies, skepticism is the order of the day. Plus, the people you are dealing with are mostly police and soldiers; you kind of want them to be alive and obedient to the ruler once you've de-usuruped your government. And given what Emily goes through, having her be a tyrant who believes murder and specifically you murdering is the answer to all governmental problems feels natural and correct with the game as given unless you are taking steps to not teach her that lesson.
For myself, I actually found the Low Chaos path more engaging, maybe because I really did enjoy the heck out of Thief back in the day, but also because I did it first, and so when I got to the High Chaos play-through, it was just too quick and simple. It definitely felt like there were more interesting toys to play with on the Low Chaos path. And the game itself was fairly forgiving for how much chaos it let you have; if you were generally trying to be stealthy and avoid feeding the rats, you could still have plenty of exceptions.||
My tl;dr for why Spec Ops is bullshit:
The game is trying to make you, the player, feel bad about doing all of these horrible things, that you cannot advance the game without doing, and the smug retort whenever you point this out is that you could have actually chosen to quit the game.
Excuse me? I'm supposed to delete the game I paid for instead of experiencing it to its conclusion?
For me it worked, because I genuinely started to get carried away during the white phosphorous scene just like in the support mission in CoD: Modern Warfare, and when a big white blob appeared on the screen I enthusiastically went "Ha! Got you all!" before really thinking. So the reveal that I just killed a bunch of civilians felt like me and Walker were to blame. I guess you and @Dean have better fire control .
Nah, not at all. That scene is precisely where I think Spec Ops was strongest as a deconstruction of the COD formula, and as art in its own right. The getting caught up in the momentum is a key part of the moment, and not knowing the consequences has a merited sting. Walker and you being in alignment is what makes it work.
For me, the point where The Line approaches the line is the much-later twist, which recontextualizes Walker from understandable to deluded from the start. Here the alignment between the player and Walker turns into a jab at the player, because there's a sharp difference between 'kept pressing on a questionable mission' and 'was clearly deluded and having conversations with no one.'
Part of the drama/tension of going forth with a questionable mission is that there's an actual conflict over the decision. There are reasons to not go, but also reasons to go. A good deconstruction / reflection on the tragedies of war accepts responsibility for the decision- either decision- despite the sentiment (and flaws) leading to it. Walker can work perfectly fine getting his team risked / killed because he wants to be the hero, and the ending where he stops fighting and goes back home is a glorious defeat.
But that tension fails when the player-avatar is forced to be the unreasonable person in a reasonable-standard test. Then it's not a question of 'did he do the right thing for the wrong reasons' or 'did he do the wrong thing for the right reasons.' It's just a question of 'should this guy be in a sanitorium?'
That's a pretty direct question with a pretty boring answer. And when the subject in question is more or less explicitly a proxy for the player, it's an implied judgement on the player as well.
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There's more than a nugget to this.
Commercial art as a message partly depends on people recognizing the message they'll be seeing in advance. Video game purchases aren't a random loot box dynamic where you know in advance that you don't know what is coming out. Player's money, and time, is limited, and so they're trying to select for their desires. If you want a horror game, you don't look for a highschool rom-com game, or vice versa. There's a reason even Doki Doki Literature Club has great big warning labels, just in case you are confused.
Subverting expectations is a delicate balance between surprising and delighting the audience with a twist they didn't see coming, and the writer being a pretentious twat. When people went to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, they wanted a sequel to a known property. And when they went back for episode 8 after the fanservice feel-good nostalgia baiting of episode 7, it's because they had an expectation of what they were going to get. However, Rian Johnson was a pretentious twat who thought subverting expectations was a pass to shit on the audience's interests, and low and behold interest in the Star Wars properties, and merchandise, and everything else promptly and sharply declined.
Spec Ops: The Line isn't Rian Johnson tier subverting expectations, but it very much is a product that does a bait-and-hook. Come for the modern warfare shooter gameplay, stay for the... warcrime simulator? Emotional masochism?
Don't get me wrong. On balance, I like Spec Ops: The Line. I think it has some artistic merit. But that artistic merit is when it's focused on the central character, not the player who doesn't know what's coming. The player is being carried along by pre-commitment bias, not agency of deliberate choice. They don't know what's coming, and that's not their fault when it's the artist doing the bait-and-hook.
I am extremely sympathetic to the people angered by the 'you could stop playing any time' after they paid. I am more sympathetic than I would be if, say, the developers got an attendance commission to go to a convention, and then got pissed on with the threat their attenndance commission being forfeit if they left rather than take it. At least the developers would have been led there with the prospect of something they wanted, money, if they put up with it. The Spec Ops players already got their money taken. Making them the subject of ridicule by proxy is just rubbing salt in a wound they weren't expecting and were misled into paying for.
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Just to correct you, the Outsider didn't cause the plague, the Lord Regent did. The plague originates from Pandyssia which is an uncharted landamass with extremely hostile and deadly fauna and flora.
But yes, that's what Corvo could've have thought, since that's the point of view that the Abbey would use. And probably the one he would believe too at that point.
On Spec Ops, I think the game's story is good, but the issue is that the game presents the choices as mattering to the player, but they only matter to Walker. It's a story that really doesn't take advantage of being a game.
But also the media talking about also I think made a huge disservice to it because they tried to present it as some kind of commentary to shooters in general, when it really doesn't work like that, and if you look at it from that perspective the game becomes much worse.
Like the way Dishonored gives you all these cool toys and then gives you a bad ending if you misuse them works way better as a game narrative than the white phosphorus scene where you don't have a choice to do anything else. Walker chooses it. He's the protagonist of that game. Meanwhile in Dishonored the player's actions that shape the narrative instead.
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