Road Tripping Dubai: The First Choice
One of the most interesting aspects of the game Spec Ops: The Line is that the game clearly forces you to make several difficult decisions throughout your journey: saving the the soldier? Saving the civilians? Killing your ally to prevent his suffering? Letting him suffer a horrible death? Revenge? Redemption? Many games can give you the power to choose, but very few of them can hide the fact that you are making a choice, and in this aspect, Spec Ops: The Line exceeds all the expectations. For me, the best example of this was the decision you have to make under the bridge, when you have to choose between killing the citizen who stole water and the soldier who killed the citizen's family. In this part of the game, you apparently can only choose between shooting one guy and the other, the decision of NOT shooting them is not made clear. While the most obvious alternative not to kill those guys would be to kill the snipers, I wonder how many people thought about freeing the two prisoners instead of trying to go through without shooting anyone.
The decision power has been implemented in such a different way that I ended up ignoring the very first decision I can make in the game because I didn't actually know that it was a possible decision until I read Killing is Harmless: soon in the beginning of the game you find a CIA agent who apparently knows what's going on, but doesn't seem very cooperative with you. You can either kill him on the spot or just let him go. I don't usually experiment much with the game, so for the first time I played it, I just let him go. Since you get no specific trophies for this part of the game, I never really considered killing him a choice, and this is where things get interesting: most games reward you for taking "good actions". It works like that in inFamous, Mass Effect and Bioshock. On The Line, your only reward for letting him go free is a scene where you see him alerting the rest of the guards around the area, causing them to attack you earlier than if you had just killed the guy before. Weirdly enough, taking the "renegade" action would render you extra instants of peace, stopping the other soldiers to attack you when you get to the market (in fact, when you get there, there are no soldiers AT ALL to confront you). As the author of Killing is Harmless mentioned, though, it is the kind of moral decision that is difficult to take. Maybe not so much in the beginning of the game because you still have your mind set on the idea that, like in all other military-themed games, you're the hero. You're everyone's savior. You can't go wrong with being a nice guy with everyone. For me, during the second gameplay, even though I knew the guy was about to complicate my life I did take a while to find the will to pull the trigger to a guy that apparently hasn't done anything wrong for me.
And with this post, I finish the "Road Tripping Dubai" series of posts. Well, that was fun! I'm in the mood to do this with more games (and even books, if possible), I just need to find a bit of free time to write longer posts...