Spec Ops: The Line

Moral choices are made by aiming and shooting, not through a menu. Faced with two strung-up men, you decide which one Walker kills by simply shooting him, with no prompt. It feels more immersive and organic than picking between two coloured buttons, unlike BioShock's "Press X to harvest. Press Y to rescue."

Mark Brown calls these invisible choices: critical moral decisions made with the normal verbs used elsewhere in the game, with nothing flagging that the moment matters. "ask you to make your choice by using the basic actions of the game"

Without a menu, the game can hide options players discover themselves. In the hanged men scene you can also shoot the ropes, shoot the snipers, shoot both men or refuse to choose. Later an angry civilian mob can be shot, scared off with warning shots into the air, or stopped with a non-lethal melee attack.

A menu would have to list every option and spoil it. Hidden options make players feel smart and the game feel less like a rigid sequence.

Poor sales, but it started a conversation games still carry on. Spec Ops sold poorly, yet it was the first big-budget shooter to make players question enjoying war as entertainment. This War of Mine, Papers, Please, Undertale and The Last of Us Part II later explored war and moral choice in their own ways.

The game has been pulled from all digital storefronts, so it now needs a physical copy, which Mark Brown calls an erasure of a landmark game.

Yager made Spec Ops as a reply to the post-9/11 shooter boom. After Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, rivals like Battlefield and Medal of Honor showed war as a set-piece rollercoaster with one-man armies and necessary American intervention. Spec Ops: The Line (2012) set out to answer that one-sided picture.

Films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket balanced heroic war stories with war crimes and PTSD, but games had no such balance. Missile Command, Cannon Fodder and Metal Gear Solid had criticised war, but none was a mainstream shooter.

Look exactly like the genre standard so the rug pull lands harder. Spec Ops opened with turret sections, cover, collectible intel, enemies yelling in a foreign language and snarky AI squad mates, so Call of Duty fans would pick it up expecting more of the same. As a triple A game from a big publisher it could reach that audience before turning dark.

"Spec Ops was designed as a cheeky rug pull." Captain Walker's covert recon mission in a sandstorm-buried Dubai soon has you fighting American soldiers and losing an ally.

Name the genre assumptions you want to break, then give each scene that job. The team targeted three beliefs: American soldiers are the good guys, the player is the hero, and every choice has a best option. Its moral choices usually have no good outcome, whatever you do.

"That when you are presented with a choice, you should always be able to pick the option with the best outcome."

Chapter eight turns a routine mortar strike into a horror reveal. The player fires white phosphorus at what looks like an overwhelming enemy force, a familiar shooter moment, then is forced to walk among the dead civilians they actually hit. The scene cannot be avoided.

The harm lands because the player used the usual verbs and trusted the interface that the act was justified. Walker's trauma then shows in visions and hallucinations.

Walker's decline shows through barks and looks heard constantly. His generic combat barks shift from professional to detached to unhinged, and his appearance becomes tattered. Because these elements repeat moment to moment, the descent builds without cutscenes.

The tone shifts gradually until the shooter plays like horror. An unreliable narrator, hallucinations and a descent deeper into Dubai make the late campaign feel closer to Silent Hill 2 than Call of Duty. Lead designer Cory Davis wanted to show as strongly as possible what such events do to a person's psychological state.

The game also grows less subtle about its message as it goes.

Loading screen tips become fourth-wall-breaking whispers at the player. Tips move from weapon stat advice to lines aimed at the person playing, turning a UI element players ignore into a channel for the message. Lead writer Walt Williams wanted the player, not Walker, to ask what their choice to play says about them.

Williams: "What does playing this game say about us, about the games that we choose to play?"

The goal was to make players feel something, not a set emotion. Williams says the team did not want players to feel bad or one specific thing. They wanted players to notice why mowing down hundreds of enemies in Call of Duty or Battlefield stirs so little.

"The goal that we had going in was that you would just feel something."

Moral choices are made by aiming and shooting, not through a menu. Faced with two strung-up men, you decide which one Walker kills by simply shooting him, with no prompt. It feels more immersive and organic than picking between two coloured buttons, unlike BioShock's "Press X to harvest. Press Y to rescue."

Mark Brown calls these invisible choices: critical moral decisions made with the normal verbs used elsewhere in the game, with nothing flagging that the moment matters. "ask you to make your choice by using the basic actions of the game"

Forcing atrocities and then blaming players left some feeling lectured. Every kill is mandatory, including the white phosphorus scene, so players who saw the trap could not back out. The answer that they could simply turn the game off did not satisfy everyone.

When told "There's always a choice", Walker replies "No, there's really not."

Fun mechanics undercut a message that killing shouldn't be fun. It is a competent shooter with glass-shattering set pieces that bury enemies in sand, flashy executions and an achievement for 75 shotgun kills. Critics said this contradicted its anti-war argument.

Truffaut argued no anti-war film exists because every war film is made to entertain, a point that applies doubly to games.

Poor sales, but it started a conversation games still carry on. Spec Ops sold poorly, yet it was the first big-budget shooter to make players question enjoying war as entertainment. This War of Mine, Papers, Please, Undertale and The Last of Us Part II later explored war and moral choice in their own ways.

The game has been pulled from all digital storefronts, so it now needs a physical copy, which Mark Brown calls an erasure of a landmark game.

Moral choices are made by aiming and shooting, not through a menu. Faced with two strung-up men, you decide which one Walker kills by simply shooting him, with no prompt. It feels more immersive and organic than picking between two coloured buttons, unlike BioShock's "Press X to harvest. Press Y to rescue."

Mark Brown calls these invisible choices: critical moral decisions made with the normal verbs used elsewhere in the game, with nothing flagging that the moment matters. "ask you to make your choice by using the basic actions of the game"

Without a menu, the game can hide options players discover themselves. In the hanged men scene you can also shoot the ropes, shoot the snipers, shoot both men or refuse to choose. Later an angry civilian mob can be shot, scared off with warning shots into the air, or stopped with a non-lethal melee attack.

A menu would have to list every option and spoil it. Hidden options make players feel smart and the game feel less like a rigid sequence.