Ever had a campaign where your players went off the deep end?

>why did you launch the phosphorus?
>you chose this, their blood is on your hands
I hate how some people hold up such a vapid game as a 2deep4u commentary that turns a mirror on the player. You're given no other option to progress the story.

Wat?

That scene isnt the only thing in the game, you know.

No, but it's the most discussed. The whole thing is a railroad and criticizing the player is super cringey and dumb. It's like blaming someone for the holocaust because they clicked play on Schindler's List. You can't change the outcome no matter what you do so it's predestined and meaningless.

>mains Call of Cthulhu
It happens occasionally.

player or character?

Player.

Because of the game, or because he was already nuts and some minor thing in the game triggered him?

Go ahead. Aggrandize yourself some more.

>Why did you launch the white phosphorus?
I was being railroaded!
I didn't have an option!
There was no other choice!

Huh, that's weird, you sound just like Captain Walker

Second one. He alright in the game but a little weird( would stare off into space/ answer in very clear Yes or No's/ Had to take medication). He finally went off the deep end and after living behind a closed gas station for a year theops picked him up and he was sent to the looneybin.

Why so aggro, user. Sometimes you have to give people a little slack when there's no context. I saw nothing in previous user's post suggesting he thought the trip to the psych ward was all due to him.

Wow, really makes me think. Oh no, wait, it doesn't you fucking retard. The player has no choice. The game will sit idle forever. The character could have made another decision. Neck yourself.

>the point
>your head

No, I get it perfectly. The point was just stupid.

>After living behind a closed gas station for a year
Dude, what?

It was after me and my group split up. Turns out his weird behaviour was the onset of schizophrenia and he ended up living behind a closed valero gas station for a year.

The character could have made a different decision, but they didn't! YOU are NOT Captain Walker! Is there a little dissonance in the game because of that fact? Yeah! Spec Ops isn't fucking Hemingway, in many regards it is a straight up bad video game but the fact that this discussion is happening, might not that be the point?

>might not that be the point?
Unless the point was to get called stupid I doubt it. The story might have some impact if the player actually had any agency. But the player has no say in what happens. He may as well be watching a movie that makes you click a button every couple minutes to continue. That's all the input you have.
>inb4 you could just shut it off

I've talked with a few homeless dudes in the past who had similar stories. It's frighteningly easy to have your life wrecked out of nowhere and for no reason, and before you know it you're on the streets. That's why I always spare some change, water, or food when I can. It could easily be me sleeping in a bush and holding up a cardboard sign on the side of the road one day.

Yeah. I played a human wizard who just got fucked over and over until he snapped a little. His name was Alrius. Grew up in a Not!Roman empire, was expected to be a soldier of some kind from birth since it was a highly militaristic society that had more or less compulsory military service, and his father was an officer. He showed an aptitude for magic and spent some time in the empire's magic academy, which stresses Evocation as the most important school, closely followed by Abjuration. Got a little shit in the academy because he liked Transmutation, but still got through and entered the army as an apprentice battle-mage. He even gets placed under his father's command. On his first mission, his company gets ambushed and slaughtered by orcs. Being little more than a teenager, Alrius panics and runs after seeing his father cut down, but not before grabbing his father's long-hammer.

He makes his way South, out of the empire's territory because he is vastly ashamed of his cowardice. Also, the penalty for desertion is death. Scared and hungry, Alrius chances upon a small tower in the countryside that just happened to be the home and study of the famous wizard Tomwise the Terrific, a stereotypical kooky old human wizard with little in the way of wisdom who did all kinds of legendary shit hundreds of years ago and found a way to extend his life with magic. Tomwise takes him in and teaches him more about magic, even helping Alrius turn his father's long-hammer into a functional wizard's staff. And that's just his backstory, which I would say has too much stuff happening in it if he wasn't a wizard and the campaign didn't start at level 3. Con't.

But the player does have agency you chubby little queer. Just not a whole lot in that scene.

I had one game where after beating the final villain, the party Paladin went on a rampage and murdered a bunch of peasants, because "I always wanted to do that" and now it didn't matter if he fell.

To be fair, I think that was more That Guyism than going off the deep end.

Other shit that happened to Alrius included:

>Watching Tomwise, his surrogate father-figure, get kidnapped by mercenaries
>Said mercenaries slaughtering Tomwise's servants, many of which he regarded as friends
>Said mercenaries slaughtering some of the nearby villagers, also friends
>The beginnings of a brutal war between his homeland and the independent villages he had come to call home
>Not living to see Tomwise's rescue, after having been betrayed by a party member mid-rescue mission and left for dead while surrounded by dozens or mercenaries
>Accepted his death and didn't attempt to fight back
>Got resurrected by a mysterious third party
>Except they fucked up the magic and actually turned him into a vampire
>But not before the feet were chopped off his corpse, as was custom in his homelands for those who were deserters in life
>Had to kill one of his own friends who left the party after Alrius's death and was corrupted by an evil dragon
>Slowly coming to accept his vampiric nature and gradually becoming crueler, more pessimistic, and eventually just viciously evil
>Getting destroyed by a cleric
>Having what remained of his soul banished forever to the Shadowfell where it is eternally tormented.

I hate when that kind of thing happens. Yeah, it's their character, they can do what they want, but that's not the character's personality, it is the player's. And then if you're trying to roleplay, you're stuck in the situation of either not stopping this player's idiocy IC for metagame reasons, or you get to have your character act out seeing their friend go nuts more surely than if a demon possessed them, and put them down like Old Yeller. It's a weird tonal shift.

The point of the game was to criticize the mindless killing done in other military shooters, such as call of duty. In those games you go through a kill tunnel to solve the problems of the world. There is no choice in those games, and in fact there is reward for the slaughter you commit. You get on drones and helicopters, trained to kill all life you see on screen, with no regard for civilian causalities. Just like the character, you didn't have to play the game and do those things, but you did so to complete the mission (To finish the game). There was no choice because there never is. I think it delivers a strong message, but the medium is exclusive to games, since it is a criticism of "military shooters".

whoops meant to be a reply to this

The difference here being that you're providing continual active input towards this conclusion, just as you are in other games where you engage in continual mindless killing. You did have a choice to avoid this conclusion.

Also it's nothing like blaming you for the holocaust for pressing play on Schindler's List. It's more like saying that because you pressed play on Schindler's List and sat through it, that you're the type of person who pressed play and sat through it, for whatever that means. In this case they chose to have civilian targets present and create a narrative where violence doesn't solve all problems ever to highlight the absurdity and childish of modern war shooter narratives.

youtube.com/watch?v=x_liczxalzk

/thread

Why do people hate this game?
Even if you don't like 4th wall stuff i believe the team's decent into madness and the art direction we're superb.

...

People hate this game not because it was done poorly or because it was "bad". They hate it because it pokes fun at the power fantasy most people who play games like these want.

It provides a mediocre shooter experience, but as the game goes on gets harder and harder and mocks you for failing. It forces you to do the "heroic" thing, then shows you the genuine consequences of the actions you take. It has characters make excuses for their monstrous behavior, and calls them out on it. "I was following orders." "I did what I had to." "I didn't know." You had the option to stop, and you didn't.

And in the end, in the final cutscenes, the villain confronts not just the player character, but the player, and asks "Do you feel like a hero? Was this worth it? Did you get what you wanted?" and the answer is no. You feel like a scumbag, you acted like a shitheel, and what you got was playing a shitty game and doing horrible things to people who didn't deserve it, for fucking /nothing/.

And that made people feel bad. Which was the fucking point.

So they say "It's a bad game", when in actuality it's a modern-day Modest Proposal, poking fun at the mainstream and its followers, and people don't like the fact that they wanted to murder all the brown people and got made fun of for it, rather than given a few cheevos they can put in their Steam Profile.

Game's a fuckin' masterpiece, the Schindler's List of video games. Would I recommend people play it? Fuck yeah. Would I want to go experience it again? God no.

My group turned Phandalin into a brothel town by enslaving the people and nearby goblins. They made the mansion into the sex mansion and all the towns people into slaves.

I've had a few games where players went too far and broke things and the game ended. I think everyone has. I'm not sure about you but that always annoys me.

My favorite time when a player went off the deep end is one where he owned it and the game was able to continue.

It's long ago, back when I still played D&D and a friend of mine's Paladin gets into a bad situation. We all get told that if we don't do what this evil asshole says he's going to kill some innocent people, including our families.

Paladin says he will do whatever he's told. Says he swears on his honor. We kill some of the evil guy's rivals (also pretty evil, so it's not like we'd gone off the deep end.. yet) and the evil master invites us to his house. He makes the paladin swear on his soul and god he won't try anything before he lets him inside then makes a show of being an evil dick.

So the paladin grabs him and beats him to death in the middle of the room. I'm down with it. I'm playing a rogue/barbarian so the moment he makes his play I'm there with him. DM says he falls for what he did, but that he might atone.

Player says he's still got some evil to do.

The ex-paladin saves the captives and fucking murders the SHIT out of everyone that was working for the evil guy, then all of his allies, then takes us to kill some corrupt church guys we knew were sketchy but had zero evidence on that could possibly justify killing them.

Then we went and saved a village. Because, he said, he's still a fucking hero. When the mayor doesn't pay enough he punches him in the face and we have to beat down the mayor's guard.

>force the player to be a terrible person
>DO YOU FEEL LIKE A HERO?
>well no but you only offered me non-choices which kind of dulls your point
>also the mechanics are pretty shit desu
>YOU JUST DON'T GET IT

Spec ops was a mediocre game with a decent idea and poor execution. Don't need to wank yourself dry over it, user.

You do have another option though. You can not play. The devs said turning off the game and walking away was Walker snapping out of it.

But you didn't do that did you? You kept playing.

>You can not play.
I did this.

I read that someone made a low quality shooter with a moralizing story so I didn't play it at all.

>Don't play this game you spent money on

fucking undertale did that twist better than your 2d4u fps.

Let that sink in.

"hallway walking simulator" did a better job at that.

>Game's a fuckin' masterpiece

wew lad.

Personally I liked Spec Ops for being something different, but it could have done a lot of things better. Mediocre gunplay aside, the way they push you into committing a war crime could have been more clever and manipulative. Criticisms about it are pretty fair and geniunely roll my eyes when people make excuses like 'oh you could have just turned off the game, it's meant to be bad'. It was interesting but could have been done better.

The best work in Spec Ops are the subtle hallucinations. It has some not so subtle hallucinations too but the best ones you barely notice. It managed to make up for the mediocre gameplay with some clever ideas, the effort to make be feel bad didn't really work but I could see what they were aiming for. 10/10 it was alright - IGN.

>You do have another option though. You can not play.
Which is exactly why the lesson has no merit. Games are built to be played. Spec Ops' supposed lesson has no impact because it criticizes the player for the simple act of engaging in the medium. This is like a movie telling the audience they're terrible people just for being there

>WHY DID YOU LET THIS HAPPEN
>YOU COULD HAVE STOPPED THIS
>ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS TURN OFF THE DVD PLAYER
>DO YOU FEEL LIKE A HERO?

This is what Spec Ops' whinging sounds like. Turning off the game doesn't affect the story or give the player agency within the confines of the narrative. It doesn't change the choices Walker makes and it doesn't affect Walker's ultimate fate, it just keeps the player from seeing the end. If there were actual choices to be made in Spec Ops the white phosphorus scene might actually mean something, but there aren't. You just walk down a hallway until you hit the end and the game tries to make you feel bad for being there.

>go to holocaust museum
>feel shitty
>But.. but.. I was railroaded into this!
>muh agency!

Honestly user, just because the game didn't hold your hand or make you feel pretty doesnt mean it wasnt good.

Stop hallucinating.

Spec Ops is closer to
>go to holocaust musuem
>feel kind of shit this stuff happened
>man that's pretty sad
>curator walks up
>"you did this"
>u wot
>"do you feel like a hero user?"

Which is why Spec Ops' moralizing doesn't work. Criticizing the audience for the simple act of observing a story is pointless and only serves to make the creator look pretentious. And the mechanics were slightly below bog standard, so that didn't help.

>the team's decent into madness and the art direction we're superb.
I'm with you on this. I think its a shame the meta component distracts people so much from the games other strengths.

What a retarded argument, imagine if this happened in your tabletop game
"Your king has decided you must kill the innocent townsfolk, do you decide to do so? No?? Fine then, that concludes this campaign"

Bullshit. That's the laziest shit writing cop out you could possibly do. They should have made it possible to advance without burninating shit at all, make it a choice of "kill this area with fire" or a near impossible "fight an entire platoon at once by yourself".

An example of "muh you could have just walked away" done right? The one Far Cry game. At the beginning of the game you have dinner with your dad or whatever, and he gets up to torture a fucker. You can sit and wait for him to get back, and if you do, he brings you to deliver the ashes (the entire reason for the plot in the first place) in his helicopter himself! It's literally the best ending there is for the game!

... the point is that you sought out this game, man. You play that game because you wanted to play a modern military shooter.

It's cool if you don't like it, but you can at least be honest about the message.

well, it kinda leaves Tibet or wherever you are a war-torn hellhole

I disagree with you. You had an idea of what you were playing when you started that game. You knew. You knew. You could have shut the game off or not even played it, but you didnt. You wanted that fantasy to play out and make you feel something. The game is good because it pegs you as the player to the wall.

>well, it kinda leaves Tibet or wherever you are a war-torn hellhole
That happens no matter what you chose.

> man i love Ego shooters and war-related games
> goes to a museum about world war 1/2
> "shit war was terrible in reality"

In such a digitalized age a lot of people dont go to a museum.
I think you can at least understand how this game was infuriating for them as it was, if you so want, a forced trip to a museum
wether or not it is ok to create a game with this feeling is another question but the point stands that for the target audience the game did what it was supposed to do.

My god, are people really this fucking thin-skinned that a game making them do a bad thing and then pointing out that bad thing sets them off this hard? Fuck's sake

Have you ever considered that the monster in the game is you as the protagonist, and not you as the player? Shooters' decade-old "the protagonist is a non-entity because the protagonist is the player itself" caveat kind of ruins any potential for a story where the player and the protagonist are not one and the same, it seems

IIRC the options are
>Let child trafficking ISIS win
>Let anarchist ISIS murderers win
>Let the government root out the violent rebels and restabilize the country
Honestly if they made a DLC where you get to kick the tits out of those fucking hypocrytes I'd have bought it.

All that boils down to is the oft complained about "Ur Paladin Falled XD!" style of DM.

not really though. I could appreciate it as something different from the standard Call of Duty war shooter bullshit, but it never made me feel like shit even when it was being really on the fucking nose trying to tell me I'm bad for playing their story.

If anything the hints in loading screens trying to make me feel bad just took me out of the protagonist mindset and reminded me I'm playing a game. I enjoyed them because it's still a subversion of the usual loading hints, but they weren't actually effective at making me feel bad. I'm not actually making a choice to be a bad person in game so the attempt to make me feel bad doesn't really work. Just continuing a story where the main character does a bad thing doesn't make me bad, it's just a story. So yeah, it could have been done better but I liked the way the game messes with your vision in game to display your protagonists state of mind. If anything the little tricks were the best thing about the game, the story was ok.

But what a fall! Its a tragedy in the literary sense, and you rarely if ever get games like that. Actually, besides Braid I dont know of any others.

>But what a fall!

But it wasn't though. A fall from grace requires you to have another option and not take it.

Fallout NV does the moral choices thing better in it's Grand Canyon DLC.

>you could have bought the game and not played it :^)

Really, this is delusional.

>pigeonhole people into feeling bad instead of presenting a conscious choice for the player

Spec Ops doesn't even bill itself as an ego shooter. The entire box design lets you know right off the bat this is going to be edgy and depressing shit, which is fine and the game even does most of this well (the dialogue in particular is really good).

It's fine to make a game where a player can be and is criticized for their actions. That isn't the problem. The problem is that Spec Ops bills itself as an edgy and dark shooter and then pulls meta shit and tries to call the player out for actions taken by the main character that the player has no input in beyond seeing the end of the fucking story. The game does the equivalent of insulting a book owner for having the gall to read to the last page which is why the entire point of the message is worthless.

I don't even mind negative/bad/intentionally unsatisfactory endings. Bad ends can be a great way to tell a story and make the player think about their actions. I love the Dark Souls series and that's a series where literally every option is fucking pointless, but that's also the point. Hyper Light Drifter is easily a 9/10 game where the entire story revolves around the inevitability of death and about how you'll never win no matter how hard you fight. The key difference between these and Spec Ops is that Speccy chooses to go meta and call the player out just for existing, which is poor form and does nothing to strengthen its narrative. It wanted to do the same thing Undertale did, but the creator of Undertale understood that for criticism to mean anything it has to be earned; the player must have actual agency in the game narrative. You don't call the audience of a movie a bunch of shitheels because they didn't get out of their seats and stop the bad guy; they literally can't stop the bad guy. The same is true in Spec ops. Nonparticipation is not a valid choice in a story where you have no means of real participation.

Taking it out of the YOU CHOSE TO DO THIS (as a player) context, does it work as a story you the player drive forward of a character's bad decision driven decline into madness?

There's a lot of fiction about people fucking up badly until they're dead, and it seems the better way to look at the game is like watching a movie like Bonnie and Clyde, where you know it's going to end badly.

That raises the question why I should pay money for a game I'm not supposed to play.

Well if it's the game designers wish that I turn off the game to not to get railroaded into that kinda BS, well I have better solution, as in never bought their game.

>The game does the equivalent of insulting a book owner for having the gall to read to the last page which is why the entire point of the message is worthless.

But a lot of satire does this. Like, every written piece of satire in the history of the world has called someone or something out for existing. If the target happens to pick up a copy, the message isn't suddenly invalidated.

The choices you made that the game wants you to feel bad about aren't the ones you made in the game. It's the decision to buy or play the game in the first place. The entire FPS genre at that point was 'Go place, kill [nationality], get praise'. That shit's fucked up if you think about it for just a second, even if it is fun to play.

... what changed?

The only thing I can think of is that you get more kickass toys to do it now, and maybe a talking robot.

Oh wait, there's also Overwatch.

Where it's okay to murder sentient robots by the hundreds, but you have to feel bad about it afterwards and fight for their rights or something.

Actuallly in Overwatch on a Kings Row map as an attacker you are delivering a EMP bomb right in middle or sentient robot city. If you succeed in delivering the payload it goes off and you see these blue blastways going off from it.

It's never mentioned in anywhere what are you doing, some characters might comment about, especially the ones that hate Omnics.

None of the ingame maps are canon for obvious reasons, but with the graffiti and such around it seems likely an anti-omnic group has hired mercs to scrap all the omniggers with an EMP.

>But a lot of satire does this.
And a lot of satire is also completely worthless. You'd have something to stand on if Spec Ops billed itself like a normal bro shooter and had meaningful choices to make through it's campaign, but it doesn't do either of those. It bills itself as an edgefest and tries to insult the player for buying into the broshooter meme when it was blatantly obvious they were buying into an edgefest.

Which would have been a valid point had it been satire.

It doesn't. It is completely self contained. It does not poke fun at the genre.

It's a circlejerk in which you either:
a) don't play and thus don't participate
b) suck the developer dick and praise it as a 5deep4u
c) realize it is a shit execution and get told "you can shut it off :^)"

I like it when games are subtly going "war is fucked up shit", for instance Rising Storm games, you can hear the enemy you mortally wounded plea for his life or call for medic and if you are using a flamethrower scream in agony as they are burned to death, Succesful napalm strike on Rising Storm 2. There is reason their are half jokingly called PTSD-simulators.

>lol you actually enjoyed/liked/affected/appreciated something?
What a twat you are.

The issue with Spec Ops: The Line's self-aggrandizing metanarrative is a failure to mechanically reinforce its own themes. It never stops being a fairly standard cover shooter, in spite of constantly confronting the player with the fact that War Is Hell (tm) in its storytelling.

Yes, murdering a bunch of kids with a white phosphorus bomb sucks. Accidentally dooming Dubai's last survivors to die without water sucks. I get what they were going for - the main character was "just following orders," and we, the players, were "just doing what the game told us to." If we want the Bad War Things to stop, we should turn the game off. It's like poetry. It rhymes. The problem is that all of Spec Ops' horrors of war occur in closed off, scripted sequences that occur entirely divorced from the rest of the game. When it comes to the bulk of the gameplay Spec Ops is surprisingly bad at deconstructing any power fantasies with any of its core mechanical feedback loops.

The game constructs these little vignettes of tragedy, and then uses standard, big helicopter action set pieces and kind novel sand shooting mechanics as the framing device for that. There's never a point where getting into a straight-up gunfight actually feels disempowering, even during the final chapters, so Spec Ops ends up being this Frankenstein of a dual natured game where War Is Hell (tm) except when it's not, because outside the little tragedy set pieces the devs still put together a fully functional ego shooter. The game fundamentally fails by making shooting enemy soldiers to death mechanically fun in spite of yelling "ARE YOU A HERO YET?" at every turn.

An actual "anti-war" game would be something like "This War of Mine," where being in the middle of a war zone is an actively unpleasant experience at all times. As it stands, the developers of Spec Ops are just as condemnable for making a game where murder is easy and satisfying as the nebulous customer they want to "gotcha" is for buying it.

Then what the fuck are complaining about? Do you want a fucking medal?
>i refuse to play along with the games intention
>look at me i'm special

Alright, stick to that then. Its not like they're the same game or anything.

>all these asshurt CODkiddies

Brutality in war is great. I just take issue with Spec Ops' poorly attempted 'gotcha.' Otherwise it's fine.

Again a lot of idiots in this threads chose to take presentation in the game that was pokes the back then prevalent culture of the heroic military shooter as if its a personal criticism.

Its was not intended to make people feel bad intentionally, i just had a narrative to tell and you are the hand that turn the pages. Putting the game down is just a valid an option as continually playing, its not that deep.

Complains is either from people bitching that it isn't a generic shooter without the twist or those that somehow feel insulted at what the did, as if their intellect came into question.

It was not an anti-war game the same way as this war of mine is. Its more a table flip to the fuckton of brown military shooters that choked the industry at the time. It even poked fun at it and at itself during the game, like the repeat of the helicopter turret ride.

I think the biggest difference between Spec Ops and Undertale's moralizing is that Undertale, at the very least, manages to realize a video game consists of writing AND mechanics.

Undertale has some moments that I think are remarkably heavy handed in calling you out for being mean (Execution Points and Level of Violence are both painfully on the nose) but it at least has a point when it calls you out for exterminating the game's cast just to see what would happen if you did. The "evil" ending of Undertale requires extensive, deliberate grinding of its random encounters to the point of banality, so the player doesn't even have the excuse of having gone on a killing spree because they enjoyed it. Though I would argue that Undertale's moralizing ends up being self defeating once you realize the most mechanically satisfying bosses are tied to the evil route, making genocide less a matter of curiosity and more a challenge to see if they could beat the final boss once its difficulty became common knowledge

Spec Ops is a pretty much a competent, satisfying military shooter all the way through. When they're not sticking you in little "press x to commit war crimes" cutscenes, the devs seem to have gone out of their way to make wartime murder still pretty fun. 80 percent of the time, the answer to "do you feel like a hero?" is "yeah I guess, that level was pretty neat."

That's not even mentioning the misstep of revealing Walker "hallucinated" most of the events the game. If the writers want me, the player, to feel bad for what Walker, the character has done, changing the narrative from one of "just following orders" to "the player character is actually insane and seeing things that weren't real" adds too much of a layer of separation between my player character's actions and myself that I don't understand why I should feel culpable for what he's done. Now not only was I not given a choice, but I also had no frame of reference for that choice.

Hotline Miami feels like the perfect counterpoint to Spec Ops: The Line in a lot of ways.

Spec Ops make/ sure to stop and ask you "do you feel like a hero yet?" The answer they want is "no." What you're doing in Spec Ops: The Line is wrong, and they want you to know that.

Hotline Miami similarly asks the question "do you like hurting other people?" and if the player is paying enough attention the intended takeaway is ultimately "of course not, it's just a fucking video game."

>Hotline Miami similarly asks the question "do you like hurting other people?" and if the player is paying enough attention the intended takeaway is ultimately "of course not, it's just a fucking video game."
Where are you getting that from? Explain.

>Explain.
Hotline Miami is first and foremost about its gameplay. The narrative in the first game basically is just there to poke fun at the fact it only exists as an excuse plot to justify the room-clearing action the game is actually about.

In addition to "do you like hurting people," Hotline Miami also asks you "Who are leaving messages on your answering machine?" By the end of the "main" story, literally none of these questions are actually answered. It's not until the game jumps into an alternate timeline where Helmet, who actively goes after the truth behind the phone calls, survives his encounter with Jacket. When you complete this bonus story, you get your answer: a pair of chuckling janitors made to look like the devs exclaim that it was "All a game" and they "did it independently."

The only way to truly unlock the "secrets" of Hotline Miami is to methodically pixel hunt through every level, i.e., play the game in a way it's distinctly not meant to be played. Your reward for this is a long, rambling speech about international politics that was only foreshadowed by title screen aesthetics and a throwaway line in retrospect. Upon hearing this, Helmet literally says "You've wasted my time."

Hotline Miami's plot essentially spends its whole time going "why do you give a shit about the plot when there's rooms to be cleared

Meanwhile, the point of the plot in Hotline Miami 2 is to go "we will not be making a Hotline Miami 3 so don't ever ask us."

Do you guys even realise that the message of Spec Ops was aimed NOT at genre savvy players, but at the typical CoD boys?

All the problems with the narrative and how it's presented are frankly not very relevant when you consider the intended purpose of the game.

You are the first fucking person I see on Veeky Forums who actually understand this game, and I've been here a long time.

But that's rather insulting to the CoD boys as it is a games company deliberately treating their audience like "special" children who need their hand held at all times.

>what libcucks actually believe

>But that's rather insulting to the CoD boys as it is a games company deliberately treating their audience like "special" children who need their hand held at all times.
As someone who has many CoD junkie friends... they are actually pretty much "special" children. At least when it involves videogames.

A while ago, one of my CoD junkie friends dusted off his PSOne to replay his favourite game, Resident Evil 1. He couldn't play it anymore. His videogame skills have decayed. He had to read shit, and remember things, fight with the controls, preserve his resources...
It was really sad.

To be fair, resident evil 1 is borderline unplayable with its shitty controls.