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#SPEC OPS GUY TV#

#SPEC OPS GUY TV#

There’s a certain art style where there’s a graffiti artist who will draw, like in the TV station… There’s even a recurring graffiti character, I don’t know if you noticed, it’s really subtle, just something for people who might pick up on something like that. In Spec Ops it seems to be a subversion of the advertising and commercialism.įrison: We wanted it to feel like a real location, a real city, and the graffiti is part of communicating something about the story and the different factions that are in Dubai, but a lot of it was just to say, “hey, this is what would happen after months and months of chaos”. One of the things that I noticed that I don’t think has been particularly visible in any of the trailers I’ve seen is the graffiti, which kind of reminded me of Rage's found art. RPS: I think it was Gears of War that had the booklet called ‘Ruined Beauty’ (EDIT: it’s ‘Destroyed Beauty’. But more than anything it’s the beauty and being able to destroy that. It allows you to set the game entirely in one place but with a great deal of variety of stuff that you can do with it, which is all really cool.īut the other half of that is that while we’re not trying to make any sort of political statement, we like the sort of hubris of Dubai and being able to take that down a peg was definitely part of it. You have all this beauty and amazing architecture, which gives you an incredible verticality. Definitely the biggest thing is that it’s an amazing game environment. So was Dubai picked purely for its visual spectacle or is there an element of taking the cultural phenomenon that is Dubai and using that to make a bigger impact, commenting on the impermanence of power and wealth?įrison: It’s a bit of both.

RPS: In a previous interview that I read, a different designer pointed out that you weren’t trying to be a political game, that this isn’t about the fall of wealth or capitalism. We thought that was a really neat parallel, that we have the main characters going through this thing and then at the same time, this city, this beautiful amazing city, has also been destroyed by the situation. We have this theme of people starting out trying to be good and there’s something pristine and good in them, but then it’s corrupted and subverted by this really messed up situation.

You’ve actually said it better than I could.įrison: When someone first came up with this idea of the sandstorms, that was one of the reasons we liked it so much. Is that a case of design backing up theme?įrison: Yeah, that’s definitely true. And that’s there in the lethality of the weapons, the fact that firefights are more rapidly deadly. Despite the element of fantasy, that kind of seems like a more realistic interpretation of combat. RPS: This seems to start as an attempt to do something heroic that becomes chaos. It’s certainly a way to make it stand out from the Call of Duties and Medal of Honors. People being driven to terrible things and a sense that the setting reflects that, almost a pathetic fallacy, except that’s not quite the right term. RPS: One of the things that comes through strongly is the idea of war not just as hell but as madness. It was obviously a heavy influence and originally it was going to be just like Apocalypse Now, taking the same story and moving it to a new medium, a new setting, a new culture, a new time period. We have kind of gone in our own direction with The Heart of Darkness story a little bit as well. In the original version, Dubai hadn’t been brought to its knees by sandstorms, but there was always something missing with that initial design and as soon as someone came up with the sandstorm idea everyone jumped on board with it.īut I’m not sure which came first. So did the idea of reinterpreting Heart of Darkness come first and then the idea of Dubai as the setting came along, or was it the other way around?įrison: I’m not completely sure if the setting or the interpretation came first. Along with that you have the Dubai setting. RPS: The first thing I’d like to talk about is The Heart of Darkness influence, which immediately brings in Apocalypse Now, so there’s this idea of taking the novella and putting another twist on it. After playing a few chapters of the game, I sat down with senior designer Shawn Frison to talk about Dubai, war stories, and the tension between horror and entertainment.

#SPEC OPS GUY SERIES#

Drawing inspiration from Joseph Conrad as much as the series that it seeks to reinvent, Spec Ops: The Line is a brutal, plot-driven third person shooter.

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