At first glance, Spec Ops: The Line might not look like the kind of game that needs a military advisor on staff. Sure, it's technically about real soldiers, it's set in Dubai, and the guns you'll be wielding are either real or as close to real as the law allows them to be... but a realistic war simulation it is not. No soldier on Earth can shake off a headshot by simply ducking behind cover for a few seconds, not to mention walking away from falls that would put the average mortal in traction (if not the ground), or take on whole armies with nothing more than pluck and a few grenades. Wouldn't renting a few DVDs be enough to inform your usual military shooter?
That's a concept that's enough to make the entire Yager Developments team shudder. As enjoyable as the Hollywood fantasy of shooters like Modern Warfare can be, there's far more to actual modern warfare than big explosions and grizzled soldiers sitting behind conveniently placed turrets - especially for a game like The Line that seeks to be, in the words of creative lead Cory Davis, "hyper-realistic, but emotionally authentic."
The company's almost-literally secret weapon is a "crazy-massive Hawaiian dude" called Will, currently working overseas for the US State Department. Being on active-service, much of his background and current assignment details had to be kept off-the-record for security purposes, but videos of him in action and a few carefully told stories made it very clear that he's the kind of guy you want pulling your ass out of the fire if you're ever taken hostage, and never want to see waving the business end of a knife in your face.
His contributions are far more involved than simply shooting some fake guns and saying "Yep, seems fine." Instead, he's been involved in everything from making sure enemy barks (in-game shouts) are things a real soldier might say, to the nitty-gritty of animations and character responses. He and his own team were able to film things like vaulting over the scenery without losing a tactical advantage, as well as show the animators exactly how you hold a particular shotgun type without getting a black eye. He also helped train some of the stunt actors, several of them military types themselves, and even provided a few bits of mo-cap data himself. When you see one of the heavy soldiers collapse to the floor onto his knees and slump over, congratulations: you just killed Will. And as a gamer himself, there's a chance he may later return the favour in the multiplayer mode.
"To tell this story in a way that's emotionally impactful and believable, we had to ground it in reality," explained Davis. "All along the way, we used him as a barometer for whether or not our story was being effective and authentic - he told us hostage rescue stories that were heart-wrenching, stories that were heroic and amazing, so there is this huge wide spectrum of emotion that goes into these conflicts. He also explained to us how soldiers are trained to handle these horrific situations, and how our main character Walker would approach these situations where civilians are in horrible scenarios, where his own squadmates are in danger, where his life is in danger, how they would react."
That's especially interesting in this game because of the nature of the story. Where most shooters tend to come across as Team America without the self-awareness, Spec Ops: The Line is an attempt to create an interactive Heart of Darkness. It's a story full of war-crimes and potential atrocities and horrific moral choices, worlds away from the (at least relatively) clean heroism of most games that tend to get this degree of expertise on board.
It's important to note that the State Department itself isn't involved in the game; it simply gave Will permission to work with Yager on it. Still, simply getting that permission speaks to a growing perception of games as a mature storytelling medium, and one that's ready to branch into darker territory. Ex-cop turned Police Quest designer Jim Walls didn't paint a completely rosy picture of the job in the 80s with his games, but they weren't particularly edgy either. Likewise, while the Soldier of Fortune games took great glee in letting players shoot limbs off baddies, it's hard to imagine protagonist John Mullins casually leaving a man to slowly burn to death in the 90s.
As dark as those games could be, both took place in times where gamers and the world primarily expected heroes and paragons. That's still somewhat the case, but in the wake of shows like 24 and the likes of GTA, failure - moral and otherwise - is increasingly an option. The still-in-development Rainbow Six: Patriots, for example, introduced itself to the world with a very 24-inspired trailer where its counter-terrorists were left with no choice but to sacrifice the hostage they'd once have saved as a matter of principle. Back in Spec Ops, there's no guarantee that you'll finish the game on any higher moral ground than your enemies.
To Cory Davis, this makes for a great chance for gaming to shake things up. "I think we have a really huge opportunity to use interactivity to spark certain emotions and thoughts in the player that other mediums don't necessarily have and can't explore in the way we can.... but we're just starting to have all the things come together that allow us to do that. I'd like to see developers try to push what they can do with narrative, what they feel strongly about in their lives, and invite people to think about those things as well."
"Do people want to sit down and play a videogame that's not going to make them feel awesome?" adds lead writer Walt Williams, no stranger to dark stories after working on games like Bioshock and Mafia II. "Think about the movies we watch, books we read, music we buy. We as a culture explore our emotions through our art; the emotions we may not want to feel. We explore sadness, we explore fear, we use our art to let us feel these emotions in a safe environment. In videogames we decided it was time to broaden that. We almost want the player to be angry with us for giving them the road they go down; to want to get to the end to digitally spit in our face."
It's combining this sense of narrative with the realism you can only get from intense experience that promises to make the result work so well - an experience that feels authentic, if not actually realistic, mixed with a brand new type of story experience for the shooter market to sink its teeth into. It's amazing how much easier it is to overlook something like headshots healing in cover than a small, niggling detail like a soldier leaving themselves completely undefended, and just how much more badass it feels to think that you're in control of a trained killing machine instead of a mere lunk with a gun. Combine that with decisions you can imagine a soldier actually having to make, if only on the worst day of his life, and what could so easily have been a regular shooter soon develops into something with the potential to be much, much more.
That's why experts matter, and why the guys who write the words are just as important as the ones who balance the guns. Whether or not it all comes together to create the Apocalypse Now that they want though remains to be seen, but at the moment it feels like we are entering a new phase for the shooting game – one where developers shoot for the heart rather than just the gut.
They should really scrap "spec ops" from the title, makes this game sound generic as fuck when it's actually trying to be a different kind of shooter to the Cods and the Battlefields.
Essay Pro