In an interview with the German website Gamestar, Yager Entertainment revealed some interesting details about its cover shooter, Spec Ops: The Line. According to the team, the game has been in development hell for over five years and despite its efforts, it was a financial failure.
“The title, which inspired people to write whole books on their confrontation with Captain Walker and his descent into madness, could not justify its development.” wrote Gamestar.
As the developers told Gamestar, it took them over five hellish years to complete its story, presentation and game mechanics. The team then somehow convinced 2K Games to publish this shooter. However, and as 2K Games noted in its Q1 2013 report, the game’s sales were below expectations.
Which pretty much explains why the team won’t be making any sequel to it (or any other military shooter).
Truth be told, though, that while Spec Ops: The Line featured an amazing storyline, it packed underwhelming gameplay elements. Spec Ops: The Line was basically a bad clone of Gears of War. It played like GoW and it never felt as sattisfying as Epic’s shooter.
Not only that, but Yager failed to deliver one of its biggest promised features – the ability to manipulate sand. While Yager promised that players would be able to use sand to kill their enemies throughout the game, Spec Ops: The Line only packed specific scripted events in which players could take advantage of the desert sand.
All in all, Spec Ops: The Line suffered mostly from really casual gameplay mechanics. While its storyline and tone were mature enough, its gameplay was far from it. And that’s what caused those low sales.
Yager is currently working on Dreadnought and Dead Island 2!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Spec ops the line was a one of a kind experience. Extreme pity that it didn’t sell. Even though it wasn’t let’s say long, after finishing it indefinitely was glad to have payed for this experience.
This game gets a lot of praise for some reason but I thought it was quite a dull experience. I was not surprised to hear it flopped tbh.
Barley cranked out an hour after buying it on a steam sale. It isn’t bad but the graphics look kinda dated and the game play mechanics felt like mass effect. So I didn’t get a overwhelming impression of the game other then been there done that. Cheesey voice acting resembled a transofmers movie. Playing the game just felt like “so what” havn’t I done this in call of duty already?
If it was in development hell then that’s understandable, they went through a lot of Demos for the New Tomb Raider game which is was Square considered it a flop.
Maybe if they focused more on the gameplay then it wouldn’t be such a flop.
Financial flop, but cult game, check it out if you haven’t .
one of the greatest games ever, of course it sold bad. crap like cod sells billions good games get the shaft. shenmue is also amazing but sold poorly even though its a literal artistic masterpiece in every way, but casuals only want the games that have millions of dollars in advertisements and paid for 10/10 reviews.
Shenmue flop because they couldn’t push enough Dreamcast out. By the time the game got ported to other system, it wasn’t fresh/cutting edge anymore so one really took notice.
Spec Op sell like crap because everything that tied the game together is at the very end, you have to drudge yourself through the typical third person shooter to get there. My guess is everybody gave up after a few hour of gameplay or got put off by the boring demo. Everything from the demo to gameplay trailer scream generic third person shooter…the exact thing you’re complaining about (this is a couple of months after ME3 drop).
Your argument is the same one people make about the movie industry, which I don’t buy at all.
greatest games ever? You high? it was a annoying shooter with a annoying story.
What casuals? the game was casual.
great game with good story and characters.
failure was also due to bad marketing and advertising! (from 2K part!)
These TPS games basically are all the same. Storyline is the main thing that can give you a reason to play.
Same thing happened with Binary Domain. I’m not sure if we ever see BD 2, and everything is because of raging kids who cried that it is a bad Gears of War clone.
Binary Domain had satisfying enemy dismembering mechanic and a bunch of cool bosses. Spec Ops sadly didn’t.
agreed