- Publisher reveals why Spec Ops: The Line is leaving all stores - 30 January 2024
We didn't want it to be true, but Spec Ops: The Line is indeed coming to the end of the road, and 2K has now released a statement regarding the decision to pull the title from all digital storefronts. The good news is, if you already purchased the shooter, you can still play it. The bad news is, if you're yet to buy the game, you may be too late. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Free games: Get a Spec Ops: The Line key "while supplies last" From Spec Ops: The Line to a AAA free-to-play shooter The Weekly Playlist: It's not all Dishonored and XC… deja vu?
- 2K confirms Spec Ops: The Line has been removed from sale because of expiring 'partnership licenses' - 30 January 2024
Highly-regarded third-person military shooter Spec Ops: The Line has been removed from sale on Steam and other digital storefronts, and nobody seems to know why—not even the game's designer and director... Read more.
- Tencent now has a majority stake in Spec Ops: The Line studio - 22 June 2021
Tencent now owns a majority stake in Yager, the Berlin-based studio best known for Spec Ops: The Line... Read more.
- Tencent now owns majority stake in Spec Ops: The Line studio Yager - 22 June 2021
Chinese conglomerate Tencent now holds a majority stake in Yager, the Berlin-based developer behind cult favourite 2012 shooter Spec Ops: The Line. Tencent first acquired a small stake in the company back in February 2020. At the time, Yager said it would put the funds towards its free-to-play multiplayer game The Cycle , and then unnamed future projects. Today's news was revealed in an interview with Yager boss Timo Ullmann by German site gameswirtschaft.de , and picked up by Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad . In it, Ullmann says the move comes ahead of a relaunch for The Cycle based on early access feedback. Read more
- Someone should make a game about: Day traders - 15 January 2020
Hello, and welcome to our new series which picks out interesting things that we'd love someone to make a game about. This isn't a chance for us to pretend we're game designers, more an opportunity to celebrate the range of subjects games can tackle and the sorts of things that seem filled with glorious gamey promise. Check out our 'Someone should make a game about' archive for all our pieces so far. Read more
- How blockbuster games are written - 10 May 2018
Computer games are made out of a lot of things. Level geometry and music, shader effects and AI, physics systems and sound effects, textures and scripting. And words. Words of dialogue, plot, lore and backstory. Words for the menus and tutorials. Words for store pages and pitch documents and documentation of their systems. Even games that do their damnedest to avoid using words to tell their stories—even games that apparently have no stories at all—they're all still built on thousands of the things.  Writers therefore take a central place in game development, perhaps more central than you might expect. Working alongside artists and designers and every team, they help to build a game's world, stitching all its often divergent parts together into a form that makes sense to you, the player. To put it succinctly, writers make the glue that holds a game together.…
- Spec Ops: The Line is free on the Humble Store - 29 March 2018
Spec Ops: The Line is a hell of a game. On the surface it's a conventional third-person military shooter, but it goes places and does things that you don't very often run into in videogames. I will say no more! Except to say that it is currently free on the Humble Store . Spec Ops was definitely not a hit when it came out in 2012, probably because it looked at a glance like an unremarkable shooter, where you and the rest of Team Ooh-Rah go in and shooty-bang-bang some guys and 'save the world' and whatever. Nothing about it appeared to stand out, and the parts of it that did prove exceptional were neither immediately apparent nor the kind of things that lead to "that was awesome!" moments on Discord.  But it is a hell of a game, and if you haven't played it yet, this is a perfect opportunity to correct that oversight—or add it to your pile of shame w…
- Spec Ops: The Line is free until Saturday - 29 March 2018
Spec Ops: The Line is free over at the Humble Store right now. It’s only available for 48 hours, ending March 31st at 10am Pacific, so I advise you to go there now . Congratulations! You are hopefully now the proud owner of a game about the horrors of war. It’s hell, in case you hadn’t heard, and many people are unsure what it’s good for. Hu-ah. Here’s wot our Alec thought back in the day. (more…)
- Enemies in Spec Ops: The Line never actually throw grenades, and other game design secrets - 21 March 2018
Game designer Jennifer Scheurle Remember that metro train in Fallout 3 that was actually, according to the game's code, an "arm" inexplicably worn on the head of an ordinary character model? My favorite stories about games give us a glimpse at the kinds of workarounds and crazy tricks game developers pull to make their games fun (or to make them work at all). Designer Jennifer Scheurle gave a talk on that subject at GDC, drawing from a viral Twitter thread she started last fall. She pulled out some of the best examples from that thread to explain in her talk, and these are the PC games that stood out to me. BioShock The first bullet a splicer fires at you in BioShock will almost certainly miss. This lets the designers spring surprise attacks, but still give the player time to react to incoming fire. It's the kind of thing you likely never notice while playing the game, but is…
- Spec Ops: The Line writer 'would eat broken glass' before considering sequel - 5 October 2017
Yager's Spec Ops: The Line was as brutal as it was brazen, but was ultimately a commercial failure. This fact alone is enough to rule out a sequel, however its lead writer has spelled out some other reasons the 2012 shooter won't be revisited.    In response to one Twitter user's query about why Spec Ops: The Line won't get a sequel, Walt Williams responded rather explicitly: "Because it was a brutal, painful development and everyone who worked on it would eat broken glass before making another. Also it didn't sell." Yager has made clear its thoughts on returning to Spec Ops: The Line in the past, but never with such conviction as Williams, whose recent book about the games industry, Significant Zero , explores the development of Spec-Ops and other games in raw detail.    Which is a shame, because Spec Ops: The Line is a good game for reasons…
- Daily Deal - Spec Ops: The Line, 80% Off - 27 February 2017
Today's Deal: Save 80% on Spec Ops: The Line !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Wednesday at 10AM Pacific Time
- Vote now in the Golden Joystick Awards 2016 and get three games for 1 - 22 September 2016
As you might ve spied last month , the 34th edition of the Golden Joystick Awards is open to the public for the first time in the ceremony s 33 year history. As always, winners are voted for by the public, and doing so this year will net you a Golden Bundle from Green Man Gaming for just 1/$1/1 . That ll get you three games including Spec Ops: The Line, the remake of Sid Meier s Pirates! and a Mystery Game . Exciting. Furthermore, you ll even be able to claim your quid back in Green Man Gaming credit by playing Spec Ops: The Line. So how do you get all that? Simple: vote on your favourite games of 2015/2016 across the 21 public voted categories be heading this-a-way . Step by step instructions on how to claim your games will be communicated to voters by Green Man Gaming in October. The 34th Golden Joystick Awards take place November 18 at the Indig02 at London s O2 Arena. Tickets cost 1…
- Why I love being the 'hero' in Spec Ops: The Line - 10 August 2016
WHY I LOVE In Why I Love , PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it's brilliant. This week, Sam enjoys the madness of Spec Ops: The Line. Uncharted is voice-and-mo-cap actor Nolan North s most famous work, casting him as Whedonesque, likeable treasure hunter Nathan Drake. One common criticism of that PlayStation hero is that he s presented as a positive, empathetic protagonist who experiences no trauma from his actions, despite gunning down hundreds of baddies. That s now a very tired point, but it s also why his casting as Captain Walker in 2012 s Spec Ops: The Line was such a smart call. Walker starts that game as an action hero too, sent into sandstorm-ravaged Dubai to find out what s happened to former brother-in-arms John Konrad and his battalion, the Damned 33rd. That s all the mission is supposed to be: reconnaissance. But under your cont…
- Cold War Tech-Noir: All Walls Must Fall - 18 April 2016
All Walls Must Fall is the first commercial release from inbetweengames, the indie studio founded by former members of Yager, developers of Spec Ops: The Line. It’s a “tech-noir tactics game” set in Berlin 2089. This is a Berlin still divided by a wall and a world where the Cold War never ended. To navigate its perils and its nightlife, you’ll use a combination of social stealth, time travel and combat. It looks delicious, like a propaganda-powered, post-Syndicate dream. …
- Have You Played Spec Ops: The Line? - 19 November 2015
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Spec Ops: The Line is a pretty fun third-person cover shooter about shooting people in their faces, then sometimes feeling a bit bad or confused about killing them. I think BioShock made folks a bit excited about shooting games where shooting people was sometimes a bad thing, so reactions to Spec Ops were over-enthusiastic, but it’s still pretty decent as face-shooters go. Its sandstorm-swept Dubai is a heck of a sight too. …
- The Mammoth: Free Game From Former Spec Ops Devs - 14 October 2015
We all have different ways of dealing with loss. Some of us lash out and hurt others while some of us turn inwards and dwell on that pain. The Mammoth: A Cave Painting is a free game about loss and how we choose to overcome it. …
- The 10 Best Games Based On Books - 2 October 2015
Books! They’re like films without pictures, or games that are all cutscene. Old people and hipsters really like them, teenagers think they’re like totally lame, and quite frankly we should all read more of them. There are countless games inspired by books – most especially Tolkien, Lovecraft and early Dungeons & Dragon fiction – but surprisingly few games based directly on books. Even fewer good ones. Perhaps one of the reasons for that is that a game can, in theory, cleave closer to what a book does than a film can – with their length and their word counts, their dozens of characters and in some cases even their own in-game books, they can to some degree do the job of a novel. They don’t need to be based on books – and often they can do so much more, thanks to the great promise of non-linearity. Of course, the real reason for the dearth is…
- Daily Deal - Spec Ops: The Line, 80% Off - 2 August 2015
Today's Deal: Save 80% on Spec Ops: The Line !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Tuesday at 10AM Pacific Time
- Spec Ops: The Line Now Available On Linux! - 14 May 2015
Starting today Linux gamers can now play Spec Ops: The Line on their platforms! For more info, click here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/50300/http://store.steampowered.com/app/50300/ Spec Ops: The Line is an action-packed Third-Person Shooter that delivers heart pounding physically close combat through a squad-based play mechanic. Players lead a team of three characters, Captain Martin Walker, Lieutenant Adams and Sergeant Lugo. Each character has his own distinct personality and specialized skills, and the mature story they each play a role in explores the dark side of war in a realistic way, in which there are no good outcomes, only hard choices.
- Spec Ops: The Line Now Available On Linux! - 14 May 2015
Starting today Linux gamers can now play Spec Ops: The Line on their platforms! For more info, click here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/50300/http://store.steampowered.com/app/50300/ Spec Ops: The Line is an action-packed Third-Person Shooter that delivers heart pounding physically close combat through a squad-based play mechanic. Players lead a team of three characters, Captain Martin Walker, Lieutenant Adams and Sergeant Lugo. Each character has his own distinct personality and specialized skills, and the mature story they each play a role in explores the dark side of war in a realistic way, in which there are no good outcomes, only hard choices.
