How are you supposed to feel bad for killing everyone >See

>>383719367
God I love this game.

I didn't feel bad for killing anyone. In fact, I fucking loved killing those fucks that murdered Lugo.
Fuck yeah this game is awesome

>>383719623
Actually I felt bad after Lugo killed the Radioman. He had good bantz and a good taste in music

>>383719986
He did have it coming though, he also fueled the fight and was way too confident in his soldiers

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>>383719367
Anon, as long as you accept responsibility for being a killer and turning a flawed man into a killer with your own hands, you've learned what the game teaches you. Don't wash the blood away. It's there for a reason.

>>383719986
what the fuck? Radioman's dialogue was some of the very worst. whole game has shit dialogue, but radioman was the most egregious.

>>383720290
Never thought of it like that, makes a little more sense now

>>383719367
you're in purgatory, shit dont need to make sense

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>>383721221
The only bit I was iffy on was the section where he started making jokes about every sniper you kill.

It was an odd contrast in tone, considering he was apparently a Conrad supporter who sympathized with the awful things he did trying to keep order in Dubai.

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>>383721221
Radioman alternates between talking to Walker and to the player for most of the game.

I'll never understand this game. Of course being a violent murder man isn't normal.

>>383722484
Doesn't stop people from romanticizing conflict.

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>>383722484
And yet people continue to play games where they assume the persona of violent murder men. What makes the idea seem like a good one to such a large portion of humanity?
The game is about asking questions, not giving out answers.

>>383720290
>game tells you not to use phosphorous because it's inhumane
>forces you to use it in a scripted sequence that never ends if you don't
>provides no alternatives
>objectives like destroying your only mode of communication also don't make sense and the game brings this up as a plot point
>still no alternatives
>YOU DID THIS
>FEEL LIKE A HERO YET
>SHOULDN'T HAVE PLAYED THE GAME THEN
i clapped, so deep.

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>>383723778
You always had a choice, Anon. No one forced you to be butthurt about using mechanics as a narrative engine. You could have just left the thread. Do you feel like a shitposter yet?

I did not feel bad for killing everyone. In fact, I instinctively went immediately for the "Welcome to the Dubai" ending.
Not that I felt OK with what has happened. The story is generally really fucking horrifying and contains a lot of disturbing, fucked up or sad moments. It's just that I never felt like I'm the one really responsible. Especially when the game pulled the really stupid Fighter's Club on you.

It's a cool story (mediocre shooter though) and I did genuinely enjoy playing it - I think the story is mostly a lot better than people give it credit (though it has a few pretty weak moments), but I will never fucking understand how anyone could ever complaining about the game guilt-tripping you into anything. It literally rewards you for sticking with the "I'm just shooting for fucking fun" instinct right till the end.

Pretty and well-sounding game. I should replay it again one of these days.

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>>383724308

Spec-Ops is severely overrated despite how the game isn't even that thought-provoking because of how it doesn't dare pull any hard punches that make you step back and think for a second - it puts you on a comfortable generic shooter ride for the entire thing while leaving everything open to interpretation because they couldn't be bothered to come up with anything conclusive about the game's message

It isn't a bad game, but goddamn if it isn't severely overrated for how little it actually does with itself

What are you supposed to feel when you're a sociopath/psychopath?

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>"no I don't feel guilty, there's no other way to advance the game than killing the civies"
>"you could have just turned off the game!"

yeah that's right they made an entire game you weren't supposed to play, I fucking hate spec ops apologists

>>383719367
Only thing in spec ops that made me feel bad was the shitty gameplay

>reads heart of darkness once

>>383725225
I think you've made a mistake. The game ad verbum doesn't judge you for killing those people. Lugo, Adams, and a large portion of the cast do, but the game itself only forces you to acknowledge that you made the decision. Whether or not you feel guilty is up to you.

>>383724978
>while leaving everything open to interpretation because they couldn't be bothered to come up with anything conclusive about the game's message
Well that is clearly not true.
You might be right about the fact that at core it's a generic shooter (which is kinda part of the fucking point, as the game is a direct commentary on this existing genre in the first place).
However, it's absolute bullshit that the ending is "vague" and "left for interpretation because they could not come up with conclusive message."

No, the message is conclusive. It is in a form of a question - the point of the game IS to make you ask yourself questions about your own relationship to your in-game avatar and towards the genre tropes. But that is not the same as not having a point to make.
There is no conclusive "right" stance towards those questions to begin with. That is one of the reasons why people should actually ask them for themselves, rather than being told the answer by somebody else. Different people will feel differently about their role within the game, and about the kind of expectations they have from these kinds of games in the first place.

Most people won't think about it though. And that is the conclusive point of this game: to make people aware that this is something actually worth asking yourself about.

And it's pretty clear that they have mapped out all the possible answers, and went pretty far out of their way to accomodate all of them.

>>383725474
thus why I hate the spec ops apologists, plus the game starts asking if you feel like a hero after killing civilians, so it becomes a passive aggressive bitch about the whole thing

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>>383724978
The game uses a generic shooter ride the way it was intended; to gloss over the notion that you're killing a bunch of people. But at the end it turns that around and says, "hey, it may have been easy, but do you think that makes it okay?"

I encourage everyone to watch this vid and see all the shit you missed.

https://youtu.be/tULRgsc362o

>>383725481
But wat if zelda was a girl?

>>383725672
You do realize that the question might have been simply aimed at Walker instead, right? That you don't actually have to be an insanely egocentric bitch and throw a tantrum every time something happens assuming that the game is trying to make you feel bad, right?
If you don't feel guilty about what happened, then the question is not relevant to you, it's only relevant to Walker. There is pretty much nothing more to discuss. You are simply wrong and dumb and missed a major point of the story.

>>383726004
so I mention something that's stupid about the game and all of a sudden it's a tantrum? and how would a loading screen be talking directly to walker exactly?

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>>383725481
>>383725703


I don't mean the ending, anon - I mean the entire game and everything within it and what the things you see and do entail

Maybe I'm just desensitized and bitter but nothing about the game makes me sit back and reflect on what my relation to Walker was or what my actions entailed and said about me as a person

Last I checked the devs have also never stated what the point of Spec-Ops actually is, only that it's open to interpretation - thus one can't really say 'it's actually about x!' because that's what you got out of the game - most of what I've seen about how the game is actually directed towards the player is from a book written by a journalist about the game and not the devs themselves, but if you can prove the devs saying that that was actually the point I'd be happy to concede

You might say 'well it's so obvious that's what they're going for!' but then it's worth reaffirming that it's obvious for you - if I or any other people who argue against these things are any indication we see it as something entirely different that we think is just as obvious

>>383719367

If this game played like GRAW 2 it would be the best story-driven shooter of all time.

>>383726213
>so I mention something that's stupid about the game and all of a sudden it's a tantrum?
You mention something that is stupid about you, and then you go on a tantrum how everybody who realized what you missed is awful and how you hate them. Quite literally, in those words.

>and how would a loading screen be talking directly to walker exactly?
Because that loading screen only reflects words that are directly said to Walker you retard. Have you even played the damn fucking game?

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>>383726383

>>383726239
>Last I checked the devs have also never stated what the point of Spec-Ops actually is, only that it's open to interpretation
Virtually every author will tell you this because almost no author want to actually kill their work and disencourage army of possible new audiences from examining and figuring the work on their own. Never listen to shit: analyze the damn game and what it contains, not your personal feeble feelings or the vague platitudes made by authors or marketing teams.

>if I or any other people who argue against these things are any indication we see it as something entirely different that we think is just as obvious
And that is what we have discussions and actual arguments for. It's not what seems intutively most obvious, but what can be a most reasonable argument made for.

>>383726239
>Maybe I'm just desensitized and bitter but nothing about the game makes me sit back and reflect on what my relation to Walker was or what my actions entailed and said about me as a person

Well there you go. What more poking do you need? Your reaction to a game doing something silly like giving you a situation where you, the player, realizes you are directly responsible for the actions of an on-screen avatar because you facilitate them, but just recontextualizes the usual hero power fantasy so that the main character is a bad guy, is "I don't care."

Whatever, your prerogative. You can draw whatever conclusions you want, that's what's great about interacting with creative media. To say that it isn't about anything and that it's just vague, because the devs don't want to tell you that the game has a hard coded message that playing games about killing is wrong, when the game is just an interrogation and examination of the relationship between player and character, is just retarded though.

>>383723778
This.

I heard the game made you feel like an asshole, but they literally didnt provide any alternatives in that situation so it just felt like any other video game, i dont get it?

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>>383726923

It's less that I don't care but moreso that I don't feel a reason to care - it's not just that it's a bunch of random military dudes who drop like flies but that I feel no emotional connection to any of the characters involved as they in no way reflect me - I buy into the theory that the game is a deconstruction of modern war hero tropes and how a modern war shooter would actually turn out in reality, but I absolutely don't buy into the idea that it's anything bigger than that

I also bring the thing with the devs up because it does bother me that people insist that it's factual that the game is so-and-so when there in fact isn't a cohesive message which lends itself to theories and only theories - unless it's been confirmed by the devs to be x you can't actually claim it's in fact x is truth when it actually is a theory that you subscribe to and only that

The game is only what you make it to be

>>383723778
The whole point is that there is an illusion of choice not an actual choice

The game absolutely fails for one simple reason, it doesn't give you a choice
Did you know that in early builds you could decide to use the napalm strike or whatever at the start?
Pretty much all game testers decided not too, which meant story couldn't go on
So in the final game, you're literally given no option

And no, closing the game isn't an option
That's like saying if I close a movie or a book the story didn't happen or that it isn't there

>>383727561
For it to be some kind of deconstruction it would have to be something more serious and grounded than the Borderlands. It's simply too outlandish and silly to really deconstruct anything. At the end of the day it's like the Crossed, there might be some message or something somewhere but it's drowned in silliness.

>>383723778
Can't be inhumane if you aren't killing humans.

>>383721542
DUDE IT WAS ALL AN AFTERDREAM OF DEATH.

>>383727748
Actually, the point is that the choice is in how you relate to the characters and events. You don't have control about Walker, and the game makes that very clear. Especially in later game where it intentionally provides increasingly clearly absurd goals, and eventually at the very end even straight-up reveals that the narrator has been unreliable to the boot.

The point is not making you feel like you had choice about what is going to happen: the point is to make you chose how you relate to those awful things going on outside of your agency. To ask yourself: do I feel responsible (even though I already fully know that this was someone else's design) or not? And if I do feel uneasy, what made me continue?

That is the fucking choice the game is about. That is the instrumental question. It's not about Walkers story at all: in fact it's hinging on the gradual realization of the player that he can't identify with the story, that it is developing in a direction that no player will feel comfortable with.

>>383728007
You are a complete idiot. See above for details.

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>>383719367
>2017
>Still bringing this game up
That meme literally died 2 years ago, after another 2 years of abuse.
How about you stop? What are you? Some special kind of summer, reposting long-dead stuff?