this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Certain hobbies set off warning bells (slrpnk.net)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player’s character you are playing decided that it was the “only way” and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.

My problem is that the game does tries to do it both ways. It tries to give you in-game options to "be less bad", in the crowd scene and the hanging scene, doing a very game-y thing by going straight. But then it ALSO does the WP scene where it's going for "The only winning move is not to play" thing by breaking outside the game.

And that ruins both angles for me, it feels really lazy, like they just kinda shoehorned the angle in and felt super smart afterwards, when to me it just feels like they're covering up for bad writing. They didn't commit.

“No Russian is shock value, but there really isn’t much player consequence as it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it”

If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don’t and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.

You couldn't skip No Russian way back when it first released, that was patched in later because of the massive public outcry over that map. That's not really my point, my point is that as a writer, it's fine to engage inside the game with the characters OR place it on the reader/player, but doing both makes both miss the mark.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I know this is subjective, but I had embraced the narrative and got into the character's head as he slowly lost patience with everything

My decisions were at :

"The hanging was screw you, I am not playing by your rules"

and

at the crowd scene, things leading up to it made me just as frustrated at the characters, that I also was getting sick of things, and gunned them down because I got tired of it all and I inhibited the character - that was a point that I felt just as tired as the characters and thought everyone can die, no one here is worth the effort,

Them doing the cop outs does make the scenes weaker, I agree, - the hanging I feel was early enough before things went off the deep end, but the crowd scene, for me, was memorable because I made a mistake in the heat of emotion, when I let myself be engrossed in the role-playing as the soldiers physically, mentally and emotionally break down, it was what stuck with me especially when you reach the end and you realize how you've been played for a fool the whole time.

Would it have been better if it was tighter and they fully commited to that descent into madness, yes. Did they have to go so heavy with the messaging, not really.

The no russian mission, I felt initially shocked the first time, but once the police arrive my illusion was broken. You can just walk through the whole civilian section and do nothing and be blamed for the attack anyway - it had more impact if you were killing people but it also has initial shock value but it is all an illusion like the choices in Spec Ops.

There was a bit of a disconnect with how was it, 5 men in only body armour made a fool out of russian equivalent of swat - they were performing riot police procedure on men armed with machine guns and grenade launchers - no different than spec ops in the last stretch of the game where you are killing juggernauts and armoured vehicles, the airport guards I can understand - but the special police were funneling into killzones - and maybe that was the idea for the context for war but it was like the North Hollywood Shootout, only both sides were carrying equivalent weaponry and only one side was really using it

I know Makarov was connected with politicians and the whole thing could have been decided to be green lit as a false flag to have a pretext.