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heybeardo

The Ethics of Battlefield: Hardline

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I'm not trying to defend anything here or point fingers, but I feel like a back seat observer and am continually confused at how people can look at Hardline and say its appalling or irresponsible but didn't say anything for the countless war games in the middle east, Africa, or about WW2.

There was a reaction against the Medal of Honor reboot though, wasn't there, given the Afghan location and its own push for realism? Though iirc that revulsion gave way to wider disappointment in the quality of the game itself... so you have a point.

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...makes me just baffled at the response some people are taking to Hardline when they haven't blinked at other games in the past.

 

I can think of a few cases were specific elements of COD games were criticized for the entertainment aspects of brutal violence that hit too close to home (No Russian and London).  If an entire game had been built around those levels, I think you would have seen even more about it. 

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I don't believe anyone in this thread has said anything about Militaristic shooters being OK in general. I personally don't play any FPSS that has a modern setting, I especially find shooters that actually put a real nation as the "bad guy" (as in, not American) very distasteful.

Wasn't there a "China Rising" DLC or something for a previous Battlefield game? Ew.

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I'm not trying to defend anything here or point fingers, but I feel like a back seat observer and am continually confused at how people can look at Hardline and say its appalling or irresponsible but didn't say anything for the countless war games in the middle east, Africa, or about WW2.

 

Maybe I'm dumb, approaching this from the wrong angle, but what's the difference other than timing?

 

I think in part you are correct that the timing is the big difference here, as well as the proximity for some.  Just take Halo for example.  A game about an American super solider that defends all of humanity from a race of religious, fanatical aliens that became incredibly popular partially because it released a few weeks after 9/11 when emotions were still flaring.  In some respects you are seeing the same thing here, albeit in a different direction.  In regards to the deluge of military shooters we've seen in the last decade, while many are just facsimiles of more popular games and illicit largely the same response as seen here, I have played a few that I thought had some interesting things to say.  For example, in Modern Warfare:

 

When soldiers attempt to take matters into their own hands in the game's story, they have some initial success, but little more.  This is mainly seen in the story of Captain Price, who is constantly wanting to take some pre-emptive action that inevitably just inflames the conflict.  At the end of the Modern Warfare 3, the war isn't ended by soldiers but by politicians, and in a couple cases in the game Price almost torpedoes their efforts.  Then the final level in the story is Price going after the big bad, even though the larger conflict was over at that point.  At the time Price even acknowledges the futility of what he is about to do, but is unwilling to desist in his bloodlust.

 

The Modern Warfare series has quite a cynical opinion of war, as does Spec Ops: The Line.  I'm not saying that all these games are worthy of praise, but some certainly are.  What personally gets me about Battlefield: Hardline is the way that EA/Dice/whoever writes these things has handled the subject matter in the past.  I recently completed Battlefield 3's campaign, and it is just a smorgasbord of cliches and chest thumping.  A few levels in Modern warfare felt like commentary, but every level in BF3 felt like it was focus tested into Oblivion.  In other words, they do what they do because people like it, and damn the consequences.  This game frustrates me because I can imagine a game where something like this is explored intelligently.  I just can't imagine that game being made by EA.  I still would like to see games made regarding this subject matter, just not ones where the setting is treated as frivolous.

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This is a bit of a derailment here, but I miss what I liked about the first Call of Duty game.  And I mean the very first one, back when it was set in WWII.  I remember the very first mission of the Soviet campaign.  It takes place during the Battle of Stalingrad.  The game purposely does not give you the chance to obtain a weapon at all during the first part.  You have to dodge mortar fire and snipers as you make your way across a battlefield where dozens of other soldiers are being shot all around you.  It's a mostly scripted sequence but I still died periodically and the famous quotes (which was a new thing at the time) during each death became much more poignant.  I was a completely helpless soldier just trying to survive an intense battle with explosions and bullets flying everywhere.  It was very effective in removing the glamour of war.  I miss that.

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This is a bit of a derailment here, but I miss what I liked about the first Call of Duty game.  And I mean the very first one, back when it was set in WWII.  I remember the very first mission of the Soviet campaign.  It takes place during the Battle of Stalingrad.  The game purposely does not give you the chance to obtain a weapon at all during the first part.  You have to dodge mortar fire and snipers as you make your way across a battlefield where dozens of other soldiers are being shot all around you.  It's a mostly scripted sequence but I still died periodically and the famous quotes (which was a new thing at the time) during each death became much more poignant.  I was a completely helpless soldier just trying to survive an intense battle with explosions and bullets flying everywhere.  It was very effective in removing the glamour of war.  I miss that.

 

Was it the first CoD that had a very similar scene with storming the beaches of Normandy, or something else?  I remember it being one of the most impressive scenes in a game I had ever played at that point. 

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Was it the first CoD that had a very similar scene with storming the beaches of Normandy, or something else?  I remember it being one of the most impressive scenes in a game I had ever played at that point. 

 

It had a scene where you take out some large artillery at Saint-Mere-Eglise during D-Day, but I don't think the first game had the actual Normandy landing in it.  The scene I'm talking about is this (there's more after the loading screen)

 

 

I still think it's far more effective than anything I've played in a recent CoD type game.

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Maybe that is the scene I'm remembering, and I was just wrong abut which side it was on, because that is almost exactly what I remember with the boats coming in and everything. 

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Medal of Honor Allied Assault had a pretty intense (and fucking hard) D-Day level where you did have a gun which however didn't do you any good for roughly two thirds of the level. It's a lot less impressive visually than Stalingrad in COD (due to the respective age of the games) but has a lot less scruples about just killing you at what appears to be random. It's especially funny since it's at about the halfway point of the game and so far you have been doing cool commando mission and suddenly the game's like "So you feel like hot shit? Well, maybe try standing somewhere without a billion machinegun bullets then, next time. Not there. Nope, not there either. Crouching's not gonna do you much good in the open either. Oh, look who found the barely marked minefield!"

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So there's a blog post by Tom Bissell, one of the writers for the game, where he talks about the plot.  It doesn't describe the story in any way, it's more about the tone.  In particular, he talked about how the storytelling is "people over plot" and that there's "80% less exposition than games usually have".  I'm not sure how I feel about that in this case.  Given what we've talked about in this thread, I feel like a good plot could do a lot to assuage the fears we've had over glorifying a domestic military.  It sounds like the goal was to create a series of memorable moments because of what you do and the characters in it, which I guess is fine, but again it seems like that would also work with a different presentation than the one they're using.  Maybe they'll get it in the character moments but I honestly doubt it.

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I don't believe anyone in this thread has said anything about Militaristic shooters being OK in general. I personally don't play any FPSS that has a modern setting, I especially find shooters that actually put a real nation as the "bad guy" (as in, not American) very distasteful.

Wasn't there a "China Rising" DLC or something for a previous Battlefield game? Ew.

 

I don't have an issue with them in principle, but of course the exact depictions of these things is important. I've played a lot of Battlefield games and I've found the series to be quite hands-off in terms of trying to make statements about which countries are 'good' or 'bad', and indeed the whole concept of Battlefield is that you play as either side — neither is depicted as stronger or weaker, the varying countries speak their own languages, and maps have taken place in virtually every part of the world including the US.

 

While you could argue that perhaps entirely fictional countries should be used, a lot of the series' appeal is its relatively accurate depictions of countless vehicles, weapons, and equipment from all kinds of countries. In some ways the series has tread very close to the realm of simulation, and part of that is using actual countries and actual locations within those countries (albeit only very loosely recreated). I personally find the depiction of everything to be done in quite a neutral and unbiased fashion, which is why I find criticism of it being glorified propaganda and such — often from those who've never played the series — difficult to agree with.

 

Essentially, a particular wartime scenario is created for each Battlefield game and all of that game's maps, countries, etc are based around that narrative. This has ranged from entirely real-life backstory such as World War 2, to Battlefield 2142's

. And of course Battlefield 3 and 4 are near-future. I'll concede that the single-player stories for Battlefield are garbage, but out of over a dozen Battlefield games only a few have featured single-player campaigns — and they're really just token inclusions for the console crowd, pretty much just taking what was created for the multiplayer and spinning a story out of it.

 

As for Hardline, from what I've seen the game isn't following the regular Battlefield formula and depicting all-out military action between two factions. Instead it seems to be more along the lines of things like Payday and Counter-Strike, and in typical Battlefield fashion I expect whatever is depicted to be somewhat faithful to what exists in real life. Even if there are valid real-life issues with police militarisation, I don't see a game being based upon the current state of affairs inherently wrong. The timing is terrible, but then the game isn't out until next year and obviously Ferguson had no bearing on its concept.

 

I really don't know what to expect from Hardline though, because unlike all of the previous Battlefield games which were developed by Swedish developer DICE, this one is coming from the US-based developers of Dead Space? Weird. Hopefully DICE's involvement will keep them on a neutral track because I'll be deeply disappointed if I see any notion of championing police militarisation in the game.

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As for Hardline, from what I've seen the game isn't following the regular Battlefield formula and depicting all-out military action between two factions. Instead it seems to be more along the lines of things like Payday and Counter-Strike, and in typical Battlefield fashion I expect whatever is depicted to be somewhat faithful to what exists in real life. Even if there are valid real-life issues with police militarisation, I don't see a game being based upon the current state of affairs inherently wrong. The timing is terrible, but then the game isn't out until next year and obviously Ferguson had no bearing on its concept.

 

If that's how it turns out, it'd be nice, but the reactions from the multiplayer beta earlier this year was that it mostly felt like a cops and robbers mod for Battlefield 4 and it really didn't play that differently.  Instead of melee kills, cops could arrest criminals, but otherwise it felt largely like Battlefield 4.

 

Now, that beta happened when the game was set for launch this year, so maybe it's being reworked into something that feels like it's own thing, but I'm not overly optimistic from those early impressions.

 

Also, I don't know that Payday is necessarily the best comparison.  I didn't play the first game, but from what I understand the structure is very similar to Payday 2, which I did.  That game is about a single team of player-controlled criminals while cops are entirely AI.  I'd compare it more to something like Left 4 Dead. 

 

It's also smart in that it's focused on the goal of stealing whatever it is you're tasked to steal and not necessarily engaging in gun battles with cops.  Killing cops in that game is actually kinda bad because it increases police aggression, which means you get more waves of stronger cops thrown at you.  Not to mention that the premise there actually allows for the perfect heist where it's possible to rob a target without the police even being notified.

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