Spec Ops: The Line interview with lead designer Cory Davis09.07.2010

We caught up with Cory Davis, lead designer for Spec Ops: The Line – check out our interview with him below and keep your eyes peeled for more interviews over the coming weeks!

Can you give us some background on the game?

Spec Ops: The Line is an intense, third-person military-themed shooter with a strong focus on narrative, where we put the player into a lot of situations where they have to make extremely difficult and heart wrenching decisions that involve the lives of the characters around you whom you become attached to in the campaign. You have to take a look at your own moral preconceptions and how they affect the choices you’re making in the game, so we ask the players to hold a mirror up to themselves and the choices they make.

One of my favourite things about Spec Ops: The Line is the setting. It takes place in Dubai in the near future after a series of cataclysmic sandstorms have swept through the region, literally filling the city with sand and entombing many of the amazing interior opulent spaces there. We have a number of opportunities that sand can provide us with – in gameplay terms, we can cause sand avalanches to crash down on enemies and change the landscape of the battlefield and we can also fight in the brutal sandstorms, which will change the tactics and weaponry the player uses. We have different factions in the game, which react to the sand in different ways because of their training, so there’s a lot of variety in the combat.

On top of that we have a very strong multiplayer offering, which includes a number of co-op and team-based modes.

Why was Dubai specifically chosen?

We always look for a location that can bring the gameplay to a new height, add a new twist to it and support the goals that we have as game developers, rather than just being a background. Dubai is the perfect place for this – it’s an amazing playground with opulent architecture, full of decadent materials like marble, gold and crystal, which give us a lot of opportunities to create stunning visuals. The huge skyscrapers give us great opportunities for vertical gameplay and the sand’s effects on the city means you don’t always know if you’re at ground level or are perhaps standing on top of the glass roof of a massive atrium in a hotel lobby, so there’s treacherous ground to consider.

Can you tell us about the main character?

Captain Martin Walker is the leader of an elite Delta Force unit, and he’s called into Dubai on a rescue missing to find Colonel John Konrad. The two men have a personal relationship and Walker is highly invested in finding out what’s happened to Konrad, who was stationed in Dubai when the sandstorms struck the region. When he enters the city, things start to break down and he finds something very sinister there. Many of Walker’s emotions are expressed through his actions and the relationship he has with his squad.

How will Walker interact with his squad?

The squad is integral to the narrative; these squad mates are friends, comrades. They may not agree with each other on the way that they should approach each situation but at the same time you, Captain Walker, are the squad leader so you can order them to flank, go to a certain location, or perhaps clear out a bus full of enemies that are manning turrets. If you are more of a lone wolf type of player, you can leave the squad to manage themselves – these are Delta Force operatives and their training is their key advantage against overwhelming odds. We’ve crafted the AI in a way so that the squad can support the gameplay style that you choose.

Do they have unique abilities?

In the real world, each member of a Delta Force unit has a specific role and that’s the same in Spec Ops: the Line. So, for example, one of the squad mates is a sniper and a translator; another is an explosives expert. You get to use these squad mates in a number of unique ways and their individual talents and specialties come through in the squad commands.

Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the darker, thought-provoking elements of the game?

For me, the thing that I like to do the most is to explore things that are dark and sinister. It’s something that is very intriguing to me and I hope to fans of Spec Ops: The Line. We used a number of references and different sources in order to come up with a narrative that supports the military shooter in a new way, and Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness has been a very strong inspiration to us, as it was for the film Apocalypse Now, but of course we have a new twist on that.

How does morality come into play?

The player is thrust into situations where, essentially, something is going wrong and he has to make a decision which can affect the lives of his squad mates and the mission he’s on. We don’t have a moral decision system where you press a button to do a good or bad deed; we explore the grey area in The Line so there’s not a good or bad way to approach a particular situation. We open up the door to the player to use any of the gameplay mechanics, the weaponry and explosives that are available so they can approach the situation however they want but there is a very important impact for each decision made, and you have to live with those decisions.

Spec Ops: The Line is coming for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC in 2011.