![]() You have to get inside their heads, see these horrors through their eyes. You don’t simply come up with horrible scenes, you also have to live them through the eyes of your characters. To be honest, Spec Ops was emotionally a very hard game to write. WW: In many ways, I wish it had desensitized me, but unfortunately, it did not. ![]() JG: In creating something so compelling and, to some extent, distressing, did you ever find yourself in a position where the creative process had desensitized you to the horror it depicted? Again, that we were able to pull this scene off is due entirely to the amazing animators at Yager. ![]() Walker’s reaction to what he has done is told almost entirely through his facial expressions. Writing a scene for an actor is very different than writing it for an animation team. They have to face the human cost of their actions.įinally, the third challenge is animation. They don’t get teleported to the next location. And it hits Players in the gut, because now they have to face the consequences of their actions. Once the Player disconnects from the reality of the situation, something truly horrible happens. We stop thinking about the enemies as Soldiers and instead see them as glowing dots that need to be turned off. The idea was that we, as gamers, have been trained to disconnect from a game when the gameplay experience drastically changes. This is where the brilliant designers at Yager had the idea of mimicking the “Death From Above” mission in Modern Warfare. The second challenge was getting the Player to take part in such a terrible act. If it wasn’t the obvious result of cause and effect, and if it wasn’t absolutely key to the narrative, then we threw it out. But we made a choice early on that every horrific moment in the game had to be earned. It would have been very easy for a game like Spec Ops to fall back on exploitation and shock value. Walt Williams: There are 3 challenges when trying to create a scene like “White Phosphorus.” The first, and to me this was the biggest challenge we faced throughout the game, was making it feel organic. That scene was both compelling and mortifying in equal measure, what challenges did you face when depicting something so horrific? Jordan Garland: To anybody who has completed Spec Ops: The Line, the stand-out scene in the game has to be White Phosphorus. You have been warned: h uge, bone-crushing spoilers below. ![]() Last month I gave Spec Ops: The Line 9/10, the best score of any game I’ve played this year, so here’s our chance to dig deeper and walk The Line with one of it’s main creators. Games don’t come with a ‘Director’s Commentary’, so hopefully our Aftermath will help plug that gap.įor the first edition, I’ve been in discussion with the Lead Writer of the truly fantastic Spec Ops: The Line, Walt Williams. It’s always seemed unfair to me that, for the most part, once a game is released then the reviews are the final source of information beyond playing the game itself. It’ll be a no holds-barred, warts and all look at the game for those who have already completed it and want extra insight into the creative process straight from the horse’s mouth. So this is going be the first in a new series of interviews which I’m calling Aftermath, in which I’ll be taking to key creators of recently released games, with a twist.
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