Reynard_Muldrake: It's not copied from Apocalypse Now. It's based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. They both come from the same source material.
Mafwek: if story recycles something it's Silent Hill and Heart of Darkness novel. Anything else?
MarkoH01: But again - this is beginning to become a general discussion about such narratives and the idea behind it and it leads far away from Spec-Ops. The discussion is interesting imo - but completely OT and it'S a matter of time until the first people here will get annoyed by it. So we should better stop.
The discussion thread in the game‘s subforum is DOA and I felt like picking this game apart some more. I‘m tagging the three of you. Proper thread or not - at least it's better than the usual spam.
Now I come to one of the things that bugged me most and that fly right in the face of anyone calling this game challenging: The Moral of the Story (TM)!
There are two main messages I take away from this game:
1) War sux
2) America sux and they cause havoc in the Middle East. Boo!
That‘s about all I can make out in terms of what this game is actually trying to say. Everything else - like the PTSD-induced hallucination-shenanigans - are just window dressing that has no bearing at all on the overall moral this game conveys. I don‘t even disagree with the messages themselves, I just think it‘s as lowest common denominator as it gets.
This leads me to the point of „This game isn‘t a rip-off of Apocalypse Now, it‘s a retelling of Heart of Darkness“.
Now, when Heart of Darkness was mentioned earlier in the release thread, I didn‘t push the point further out of embarassment of never having read this novel. Hell, I didn‘t even read the synopsis on wikipedia. But here‘s what seemed to be the overall consensous on the message of Heart of Darkness: We‘re just as bad or worse as the so-called savages.
Ok... So, tell me: How does this factor into the narrative of The Line at all? It doesn‘t. It just doesn‘t. Actually, that would entail portraying the Middle Eastern enemies as brutal savages, something that this game decidedly doesn not even attempt to do. There are no IS-style beheadings, mass executions, live burnings or anything of the sort. The game portrays Middle Easterners as barely-sentient entities whose only purpose in life seems to be to be at the receiving end of American atrocities - quite similar to the way Hollywood portrays the Vietnamese in pretty much any given "anti-war" movie. If the German developing studio had portrayed the Middle Eastern enemies as brutal savages... that would have been an unheard-of ballsy move that would surely have landed the makers in some considerable trouble. It also would have elevated the game into a whole different level. The way The Line treats them now is considerably more dehumanising. They don‘t seem to have any agency at all. They‘re windowdressing. In fact, most of the time you‘ll be fighting American mercenaries committing all sorts of horrific acts against the locals, so the game can hammer home its lesson #2 as outlined above.
In my „dream game“ version of The Line, things would go like this: You‘re a young and gung-ho All American Boy, deployed to some Middle Eastern shithole to spread "freedom" and "democracy". Soon enough, you learn that shit‘s fucked and the locals don‘t want you there. You're an invader in THEIR country. As the game progresses, you‘re faced with unspeakable horrors committed by the enemy. And it takes its toll on you. Blood for blood. You‘ll become in a vicious circle of ever-escalating violence, to the point where you‘re no different from the Islamist fanatics you‘re supposed to fight. (The role of religion in Middle Eastern conflicts is also a rather touchy subject that The Line chooses to avoid entirely.)
(Spoiler for the actual game here) Two of the most powerful scenes in The Line were: A) You dropping white phosphorous on a civilian camp and B) Your squad getting attacked by the inhabitants of a refugee camp because they had enough of your shit. Why not combine these two events? Then the player would have to make up his own justifications for recklessly murdering civilians: "I had to do it, they were attacking us!" instead of "Oh well, I feel really, REALLY sorry about these people I had to kill because the game left me no other choice! Look, there‚s even a shot of a burned corpse of a mother holding her child! Right in teh feelz!“"
It would still be just as linear, but at least it would give the player the illusion of choice, and The Line doesn‘t even bother with that. At the end of the game, you have a LOT of blood on your hands. Why? What for? Was it worth it? Did you make the world a better place? How am I any different from the people I was told to fight? Oh, and what happened to all that "freedom" and "democracy"...
Let the player draw his own conclusions, don‘t spoonfeed them!
These are questions that should come to the player naturally, organically, from playing the game. Instead, similar questions are spread across the loading screens. I liked the idea of subverting those loading screen tips, but on the other hand, I felt like they were incredibly lazy. They're a stand-in for all the questions the player ask himself while playing the game.
Feel free to disagree (or not reply, lol), this is just how I - a consciencous objector, mind you - would go about desinging an anti-war game that has an actually relevant message.
