The team wanted to focus on story but publishers forced multiplayer

Aug 30, 2012 19:01 GMT  ·  By

According to one of the leading developers at Yager, the multiplayer side of Spec Ops: The Line was unnecessary and suffered from quality issues and overshadowed the very solid single-player narrative that the game delivered to players.

Cory Davis, the lead designer who worked on Spec Ops: The Line, admits to Polygon that, “The publisher was determined to have it anyway. It was literally a check box that the financial predictions said we needed, and 2K was relentless in making sure that it happened – even at the detriment of the overall project and the perception of the game.”

The developer believes that the multiplayer element of the game was only a clone of Call of Duty that lacked quality and that the resources used to create it would have been better spent elsewhere.

Davis added, “There’s no doubt that it’s an overall failure. It sheds a negative light on all of the meaningful things we did in the single-player experience.”

In the same interview, the developer says that the multiplayer mode of Spec Ops: The Line is a cancerous growth that threatens to destroy the quality of the rest of the game.

Apparently, the decision to add a multiplayer component was dictated by publisher Take Two as a price for offering Yager the resources needed to create the dark and disturbing narrative of Spec Ops: The Line.

The publisher has not commented on Davis’ statements or on the quality of the multiplayer mode.

Spec Ops: The Line takes the player into Dubai as Walker, the leader of a special operations team, and as the game progresses, his actions become increasingly disturbing, leading up to a final twist that changes the perspective on the entire story.

Spec Ops: The Line was launched on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.