Spec Ops: The Line

[Shepard]

Spec Ops: Behind the Line Part 1


K Games has released a developer diary for Spec Ops: The Line, the upcoming third-person shooter due for release on June 26, 2012.

Spec Ops: Behind the Line Part 2

[Shepard]

Visual effects development


Animation


Engineering and bug-fixing


Art and design

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Behind the Line: Exclusive Interview with the makers of Spec Ops: The Line
Almost three weeks since the release of Spec Ops: The Line back then, which turned out to be a real insider's tip in this summer, offering an incredibly exciting story.

We are the creators behind it - Yager Development - in her studio in Berlin, visited here and had the opportunity to scrutinize the game in more detail. Along with interesting views of the developers themselves, we were able to gain an insight into the development processes behind the game, and watch as an animation, created the importance of personal communication between the different teams and has operated the vast scale of expenditure in the five-year development period of the game.

Lead AI Programmer Andre Dittrich, Effects Artist Florian Zander, lead animator Mark Roeth and senior associate producer Mark stood Libold us to answer questions. A part of it, we have summarized for you in an interview.



The story of Spec Ops pursued even in a slightly different approach shooter genre from the mainstream. How did you come out this way to go?

"The game was initially started as an ordinary tactical shooter, is where the story at some point become increasingly important. Eventually came the novel Heart of Darkness as a central theme to the story and was adapted to again and again. The story also has many, many changes and fine tuning experience, because if you want to tell the story so intense, it is precisely the smallest timing matters. The later is the difference between believability and absurdity. "

What exactly you wanted with the degree of violence in the game to convey a message that is anyway set quite high and unadorned?

"Yes, that is pretty high, but we believe that if you want to edit the topic as serious as in, Spec Ops' the case, then one should not shy away from the show to the outside world. During development, we met people who have experienced this in real life, and in the other hand, is, Spec Ops' still in the frame. The point is that war is made ​​of pretty nasty violence that we must also show, if you want to get certain messages across. "
How could you play it with the Wii into line so that it appeared in this country completely uncensored?

"We had someone from our site, which has declared the whole thing and was able to convince the USK fact that the violence in the match for the violence itself will be there and certainly not as a kind of violent porn, but a necessary piece of the puzzle to the story to tell. "

One of the biggest criticisms was the cover system, which is often difficult to act. Will this still be an update?

"It is not that what we have published, long before the time, but we're convinced that it works well. Perhaps we underestimated how much the players are accustomed in other games and we get more problems, because we have not met expectations. It feels at first sight, such as in, on Gears of War ', but in more detail then things are different. And it seems some do not arrive. We have also received reviews that speak of how smoothly it works and where are prominent details that are better than in other games. But so be it, either you love it or you hate it. An update is unlikely "
A visual standpoint, there were initially doubts, Spec Ops'. For the release of the game down seems to have the graphical level but increased enormously. Is this a natural process during development?

"First we had to contend with the fact that the development time is extremely delayed. The result is that one runs after changes. The focus that we associate with 'Spec Ops' had was not so much incorporate the latest features, but to concentrate on the artistic aspect to the fore. We call this "hyper-realism," which things such as controllability of the visuals are much more important than their realism. What has been highlighted in many reviews, however, is that the setting works, almost as if a minor actor to be there. There are key shots in the game, where we said, the people have to chip away graphically simple. One of these is near the beginning of the game where you stand on the ruined highway to Dubai and look into it, which is also due to the storm wall in the background quite striking. Toward the end, as have the hyper-realism 'tightened even further and it is even more colorful. First and foremost, it only works as a whole. This is a completely natural process. "
How do you deal with the low expectations that the title was first? After the first test, which had so suddenly changed!

"That's a pretty tough question. , Spec Ops' is a franchise that was already there, and brought with it a certain expectation. This we did not meet and 2K Games has left us in respect of all freedoms and were fully behind the project, as it is now also. We have personally very pleased about the article, where you have noticed, now people understand what we are doing here. In a game like story, Spec Ops' Of course you can not tell everything beforehand. That's always a balance between the spoilers and the players to get interested. But we're delighted about that just the player feedback is outstanding and on a level with which we were not expecting. "
Are there things that you found yourself particularly successful?

"Everyone always says: The Story! Difficult to see though is how much must be done to to make it work that way. For example, the English-language recordings, which we believe to have become outstanding. It is also clear that the story has great twists, this is the requirement and brings people to think. What is also well recognized Dubai itself, as it was designed by our artists. The story works so as credible, because the background Dubai work that way. Of these [modules], there are very many small in-game. And they work so well together, and we are proud. "
Is there something that you would like to do better in hindsight?

"Yes, well what everyone says. Probably you have when it comes to analyzing the gameplay better. We initially had a standard control scheme, and were not so pleased with certain things. To these things we have worked around pretty good, but maybe you have to go back there again one step further and say if there has developed a kind of pseudo-standard, then you should not change the perhaps. "
Can you have new details about the upcoming co-op DLC revealed? This is taken from the story or be something completely new?

"The DLC will be available soon and can be downloaded by anyone free of charge. This is already a bit with the story. The game has such a section, where Walker and his team squad come in a large shopping mall. Part of the Co-op will play in this area, where you start but as a Refugee struggles against the Konrad people. The DLC is then connected in some way with parts of the story. "
You are allowed to have to say what your next project? Will there might be a Spec Ops 2?

"No, we do not talk about it ... no! A Spec Ops 2 would be possible, perhaps someday, but for now here is yet to be nothing. "
Are you looking forward to the new console generation, or because you are more awesome, because one has to start from scratch in some way?

"It is certainly very exciting! There are so many things that you do not know where you wonder what it will be because everything new. But it is certainly always nice when you get a little more performance and no longer needs to back so amusing. At the same time it is also interesting to see what it has to acquire new technology and what is new to learn. But this is also the pleasant in this occupation, it will not get bored so quickly. "

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Spec Ops: The Line's lead writer on creating an un-heroic war story

Warning: This story has some relatively major spoilers for plot points in Spec Ops: The Line.

Spec Ops: The Line has been one of the year's most surprising titles for me. I'll admit I was almost entirely unexcited about the game after playing a short demo at PAX East earlier this year. That's probably because that demo came from the first half of the game, which largely plays out as just another in a long line of indistinguishable, mindless, testosterone-fueled, "kill anything that moves" war games in the vein of Call of Gears of Medal of Duty Honor War. Taking out an entire rogue battalion of US soldiers trapped in Dubai by recurring sandstorms isn't exactly boring, but it's not anything incredibly different from what video games have been doing for years.

But then, about halfway through the game, the narrative takes a sharp turn towards moral ambiguity. The player's three-person squad is forced into situations where they're confronted with the horrible consequences of the violence they're unleashing on their fellow soldiers and the civilians caught in the crossfire. The previously unquestioned heroes of the story are suddenly recast as the cause of unmitigated (if largely unintended) misery for everyone around them. By the end of the Heart of Darkness-inspired tale, the player questions not just the nobility of their military cause, but the overall reliability of a story being told by a deeply unreliable narrator.

The initial image Spec Ops: The Line presents is miles away from where the game ends up. This slow build-up to the game's more challenging narrative moments was intentional, lead writer Walt Williams said in an interview with Ars. "We wanted to kind of lure people in with a strong sense of familiarity, like 'I know these characters, this setting,'" he said. "We wanted people to feel, 'Oh, I know this... I know how it's going to play out. Then once people stop expecting things, that's when we can surprise them, and we can get them in the state of mind that [protagonist Captain] Walker is in."

This slow burn didn't exactly make Spec Ops: the Line an easy game to sell people on before its release, Williams said. "I'd tell people, 'Hey, it's a military shooter set in the Middle East, it's narratively driven, [but] I can't tell you how it's narratively driven because that would spoil a bunch of things. You just have to trust me.' Admittedly that's a tall order to ask people to deal with, especially when so many video games are not what they say they are. I think many people were really surprised that we were telling the truth when we said, 'Hey it's not what you think it is.'"

Williams said he understands why most video games are reluctant to let a story breathe and expand slowly the way Spec Ops: The Line does. "A story has to have goals and have arc to it, [but] video games have a tendency to sell everything up front at the beginning because they want to keep you in; they want to get your $60," he said. "They want you to go through the end, but then you get no real growth through the story. You've now experienced all of the high parts of everything—it's trying to sell you on the whole concept in one and a half hours."

But that kind of strategy would have blunted the impact of Spec Ops: The Line, Williams said. "For a game like Spec Ops that was looking to be very emotional, very dark, and psychological in many ways, if we started dark there was nowhere to go. The player wouldn't have been on the journey. We've played games before that are dark games from the beginning, and they just stay dark, and you're just in the dark all the time. You don't really get that experience of descending into that darkness, of having the game feel as if it's slipping out of your control. You feel as if you're this character simply moving through the darkness, rather than being engulfed by the darkness."


Realism, not pacifism
Compared to the jingoistic self-righteousness presented in most military shooters these days, Spec Ops: The Line presents a downright cynical view of war's purpose and value. But Williams said the game wasn't intended to be any sort of overt political statement in favor of pacifism, or against America's current military engagements. "Some people certainly interpreted it as an anti-war story, and I think there's a certain angle to it that you could say it is very anti-war, [but] it's simply that war in itself is horrible. It's horrible to anyone who's fighting it on any side of the conflict, and the real damage in a war comes to those who are fighting it, and those who are in the confines of its theater. It can be much more damaging than simply death, and there are consequences of war that are worse than death."

In showing a multi-faceted view of war and its effects, Williams said he was trying to give the game the same kind of perspective you routinely see in other media. "I think that we as a culture, and even as a species, we do accept [the consequences of war]. Our films say it, our books say it, our news says it, everything about war at this point in time says look this is a really horrible and traumatizing experience for anyone who goes through it... except video games. Video games have for so long been like, 'Look, war is when you go in and kill people who deserve to die, because they are destroying the things that you love—and have fun.' It was such a strange disconnect for us going into this project that we had allowed war to become such a spectacle-based entertainment, and we wanted to make a game in our medium that spoke to the truth of war just like every other medium had done."
"We wanted people to think about war," he continued. "We wanted them to think about why is it that I sit down and play a war game for fun. I'd be curious to know how many people who are against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sit down and play a Call of Duty game for fun. At what point do people say, 'OK, this type of war is totally cool, because it's just for entertainment, it's a game.' We just want people to re-engage with the art and the entertainment that they were choosing to partake in."

Rigid Morals

While players are given a few major opportunities to make explicit moral choices in Spec Ops: The Line, the larger narrative mainly continues to descend into chaos in much the same way regardless of what the player chooses. Giving players the video-game-standard dichotomy of a "good" path and an "evil" path in these situations would have led to an unrealistic sense of control, Williams said.

"The concept we currently have of player agency [in most video games] is that since I'm the player and I'm the hero and this world revolves around me, it has to react however I want it to react," he said. "If I want to be the good guy, it has to back up my choice and let me be the good guy. And that's just not the way the world works. ... We wanted the choices in the game to be realistic in that you walk into them and you don't know all the information. You simply know what's going on in front of you and you have an idea of what you can do... yeah it's going to go a particular way based on what you've done, but ultimately there's more information than you know."
This idea that events aren't totally under the player's control is highlighted beautifully in a scene where the player is given a choice between saving a captured CIA agent (a crucial source of information) or the innocent civilians that have been caught up in the standoff. What the player doesn't know is that Agent Gould is mortally wounded, and will die no matter what the player does. "You did have a chance to save those civilians, you could have saved them, you could have been the hero in that regard, but if you tried to save Gould, you tried to choose a man who's already dying and that's simply how it's going to play out."
In another scene, an apparent choice over whether or not to use incendiary mortars full of controversial white phosphorus is largely taken out of the player's hands. "There is a certain amount of choice in that scene—you could attempt to take on the soldiers with the weapons that you have—but you don't have enough ammo to do it," Williams points out. The game essentially forces the player to burn his opposition to death with this horrible, torturous weapon, and to unintentionally take out a group of cowering refugees in the process.

"Could it be looked at as a bit of a cheat, that the game has led you in a sense? Absolutely. But so does life," Williams said. "These things happen in war, collateral damage, innocent lives are taken all the time. Yeah, it'd be great if the soldier could reload the checkpoint and do it differently now that he knows something's happening, but he can't. That's what I think makes the story of Spec Ops so effective, walking into a game that's not going to embrace you and completely bend to your will. It's a game that is in fact going to be opposed to your will, and it's going to walk you through an experience that is tailored for you not to like it."
Despite the many horrible actions the player is essentially forced to make, Williams said it was important that those decisions felt logical and sensible in the context of the story. "We tried very, very hard and went over it many times to make sure none of the moments in the game were simply to shock, but they were all very organic to the narrative and necessary to the narrative. We knew if we had just had one moment where we went, 'And now, aren't you really, really disturbed by how horrible this thing over here is,' and then back to the main thing, everything would fall apart. The player would never really know if we're just being shock artists or are we really trying to take you on an emotional journey."

Evolving video game storytelling
Besides being a commentary on the morals of war, Williams said he also sees Spec Ops as an allegory for the video game medium itself. "We were trying to create a game design and a narrative that goes with it that the way that the player was feeling about the game was going to mirror the way that Walker was feeling about the mission and the events within the story. Yes, it's a war game, and it's about war because you're a soldier in conflict. But it was always designed to be more a game about playing games and who we are as gamers and our relationship to the games we choose to play."

Williams said the development team asked itself multiple times if players would actually respond to a military shooter with such complex themes, but decided to give the audience the benefit of the doubt. "We look at the games people play and we figure they must be mindless people willing to play games, because we as the people making them feel these games are kind of mindless," he said. "When you really look at the situation, they're playing the games that we make for them, and I think we're making games based off of a preconceived notion about what the gamer is that isn't really true."

"Every game I've worked on, that question has come up: 'What about the mindless gamer that just wants to blow stuff up?'" he continued. "I don't think that gamer really exists. You can enjoy eating a really nice steak or you can enjoy eating peanut butter out of a jar with a spoon. Everyone has moments where they simply just want to be entertained, but I don't believe there is some consumer of video games who only sits down to video games for a mindless experience. I think we simply don't give gamers enough mentally engaging options to show they are interested in playing that type of game on a more frequent basis."

And Williams said he's heartened to see the industry as a whole slowly reconsidering what kinds of stories video games can tell. "I think it took this console generation for us to really begin to understand the kind of narrative we could do," he said. "There are already three or four games shown at E3 this year, AAA games that are going to be different types of narratives than what we're seeing. I think the next generation is where narrative is really going to explode for games, and we're going to see games at the level of rivaling novels or the best films out there. This is a new generation of art, and you have quite a few people now in creative capabilities that come from various areas of artistic creation and have been in the industry for so long that they are confident with what they want to do and how to get there. It will be exciting."

[Shepard]

Spec Ops: The Line updated with co (spec)-op



Today, you and a friend can confront the grim reality of war together! 2K Games announced a free update for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC versions of Spec Ops: The Line that adds a cooperative multiplayer game mode for two players. As usual, expect the PS3 version to be available sometime today, whenever the PlayStation Store updates.

The new co-op mode consists of four objective-based missions, "each with its own unique objectives, environments, and playable characters."

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Spoiler: ΕΜΦΑΝΙΣΗ

2K Games Announces Spec Ops®: The Line Cooperative Multiplayer Free Bonus Content Now Available

Additional game mode free to download for all owners of Spec Ops: The Line


New York, NY – August 21, 2012 – 2K Games' previously announced, free cooperative multiplayer game mode is now available for Spec Ops®: The Line, the exciting third-person military shooter set in a sandstorm-ravaged Dubai. The free bonus content is the perfect complement to the provocative single-player narrative campaign and is available for download* now for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system and Windows PC. This two-player cooperative multiplayer game mode is free of charge to everyone who owns or purchases a copy of Spec Ops: The Line.

The cooperative bonus content in Spec Ops: The Line features a series of objective-based cooperative multiplayer scenarios set in Dubai after a series of cataclysmic sandstorms have wrecked the city. It includes four fast-paced missions, each with its own unique objectives, environments and playable characters. The two players must work together to fight through waves of enemies and blinding sandstorms to complete their objectives, emphasizing teamwork and utilizing a variety of weapons and explosives.

In addition to the two-player cooperative multiplayer game mode, Spec Ops: The Line also features an engaging single-player campaign and a competitive online multiplayer game mode. Developed by YAGER, Spec Ops: The Line features an intense single-player narrative that unfolds within the destroyed opulence of Dubai. Playing as Captain Martin Walker, gamers fight through the city in search of Colonel John Konrad and his missing battalion, The Damned 33rd. Spec Ops: The Line also features an expansive, class-based online multiplayer experience that includes squad-based games.

Spec Ops: The Line is rated M for Mature by the ESRB and is available now for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. For a complete Spec Ops: The Line experience, including the latest news, downloads, information and more, please visit www.specopstheline.com.

* Xbox LIVE® online entertainment network, PlayStation®Network for PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system or Steam account and Internet connection required. Copy of Spec Ops: The Line required for play.

2K Games is a division of 2K, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO).

All trademarks and copyrights contained herein are the property of their respective holders.

This videogame is fictional and depicts invented events, persons, locations, and entities. The inclusion of any brand, weapon, location, vehicle, person or thing does not imply sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of this game. The makers and publishers of this game do not endorse, condone or encourage engaging in conduct depicted in this product.