It seems I have traveled back in time! Better go warn the world about Covid-19, buy a ton of gamestop stock, knife fight an internet conspiracy theorist and save various celebrities from their unfortunate fates!
... What do you mean 2021?
Edited by ShirowShirow on Feb 12th 2021 at 6:51:09 PM
You are not alone.Don’t mention it, lately I had been wondering why there were so many reruns of The Day After Tomorrow on TV, before realizing I was watching the news.
Six Days in Fallujah ‘not trying to make a political commentary,’ creator says
in a Polygon interview. So much about the "Maybe they want to shine lights on the events"
Yikes.
Jim Sterling is laughing their ass off on twitter over this.
Edited by Ghilz on Feb 15th 2021 at 12:55:47 PM
"whitewashing documented war crimes is just the empathetic thing to do"
“There are things that divide us, and including those really divisive things, I think, distracts people from the human stories that we can all identify with,” Tamte said. “I have two concerns with including phosphorus as a weapon. Number one is that it’s not a part of the stories that these guys told us, so I don’t have an authentic, factual basis on which to tell that. That’s most important. Number two is, I don’t want sensational types of things to distract from the parts of that experience.”
(Note that he says he has no factual basis. So I Guess the US Government itself saying it used White Phosphorus doesn't count?
Edited by Ghilz on Feb 15th 2021 at 1:06:49 PM
I wonder what it's like for the people of that area to have your city torched and country invaded and thousands killed and then have the Same invaders use propaganda to whitewash their war crimes. It's not right.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."If it's apolitical then what matters what side you play as, huh?
Look at this game. Look at this game and laugh.
The reaction to this reminds me of all the stuff about the story of the Modern Warfare reboot, mainly including the fact that Russia made their own Highway of Death in the game even though the Russian occupation story seemed to be based more on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan instead of anything like Desert Storm.
Edited by theLibrarian on Feb 15th 2021 at 12:59:09 PM
DIdn't know that game was being made by Ubisoft.
We learn from history that we do not learn from historyTo be fair this is a trope as old as time itself. The Ancient Romans, in the days of the republic used to send a dude to tell whatever city they were invading, how they slighted the Romans and whats coming is totally their faults for forcing the Romans to do this and they oughta surrender.
Every invader always casts itself as the good guy.
Edited by Ghilz on Feb 15th 2021 at 4:48:13 AM
The thing that puzzles me in the whole "Apolitical war game" is the idea that you want to use a historical setting then strip it of all of its historical and political significance.
What's the difference between that and a fictional setting then? Like, if you want to make a game where nobody would ask for a comment or an idea about the historical subject, why not just make it set on a fictional war on a fictional country?
A month late of a response, but nah this incarnation survived. Understandable you'd think that, since it's constantly been getting revived and re-cancelled over the course of the past decade or so.
It's out now in early access and from what I can gather what they meant by "non-political" is that the game doesn't really have much of a story and is mostly just one of those realism-focused military simulation games, like ARMA or Squad — you get dropped into a semi-procedural sandbox map and told to go to a place and accomplish an objective, and go about it however you and your co-op partners want to.
The problem of course being that unlike those games which are mostly depicting fictional events in fictional places this is openly based on, and set in, a real military operation in a real place where real war crimes happened. So, y'know. That's a thing.
EDIT: According to the steam description they're planning to add actual story missions later on, with the format being one-off vignettes based on real accounts, narrated by the people who were there. It claims that it's including stories from Iraqi civilians but I think it's pretty safe to assume that they're going to be cherrypicking the ones that don't end in "then the Americans shot white phosphorous at a crowded market to take out a single enemy commander" or "then I got cancer from all the depleted uranium the Americans left behind."
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Jul 7th 2023 at 6:08:09 AM
I am actually intrigued by this but I admit in the, "I wonder what's happening with Star Citizen" train wreck sort of way.
More people should be educated about the Iraq War definitely and video games are a way to do that but, well, this doesn't seem to be it.
(On my end, I assumed that everyone knew Saddam had no WM Ds but had thrown so many obstacles about inspections that it was past the point of no return but then I found out lots of people did believe he was helping Al-Qaeda and—well—Al-Qaeda gained massive allies in his now-fired army and that created ISIS)
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 7th 2023 at 6:23:55 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Political grossness aside the early access release is being fairly well received by the (edit) military simulation community. Playthrough and review from a major channel:
Main point that I've seen people praise is the audio design and proximity chat. Gunshots and explosions are at times deafening and enough of them at once will cause audio-muffling tinnitus effects that can take minutes to fully fade. Proximity chat with your co-op partners (along with all other sound effects) echoes and reverberates dynamically based on the environment, while radio chat is filtered to sound identical to the constant Mission Control and NPC chatter, which can cause confusion and chaos if you and your fellow players aren't organized or prepared.
It isn't perfect though; a lot of people (the linked video included) have noted that there are a fair few bugs where gunshots and the like sound further away than they should due to the procedural maps not properly configuring reverb effects — for example, a small and almost entirely destroyed building muffling/reverberating sound in the same way that a large, fully-intact building would.
Looking at gameplay videos from some milsim channels I enjoy shows that the game does seem to be making a token effort to be all "oh the horrors of war, this was a bad time," especially via the excellent audio design mentioned above, but it's all about as one-sided as you'd expect: heroic American soldiers going through hell at the hands of a devious enemy force, some What the Hell, Player? comments in the post-game debrief if you did things like shoot teammates, Call of Duty-esque "war bad" loading screen quotes, etc.
Notably absent is the ever-present civilian factor that made the real battle so infamous — missions are, at least in the current state, populated entirely by hostile combatants and allied NPCs, meaning that checking your targets is essentially a non-issue and players are incentivized to shoot first and ask questions never, which is... yeah. Seems that the "perspective of Iraqi civilians" they boast about in the steam description is reserved for those yet-unreleased story missions, which I'm sure will amount to some cherry-picked accounts from people who helped or were helped by American soldiers.
Honestly feel like this might have gone down a lot better if they ditched the Fallujah setting and used this tech and design experience to do, like, an adaptation of Mosul or something. But then the CIA would probably stop quietly funding them (at least I assume that's happening; this seems 100% like the kind of project they'd shower in cash to drum up recruitment).
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Jul 8th 2023 at 6:30:25 AM

It would be more believeable if Rumsfeld old memos
where he's brainstorming excuses to invade Iraq hadn't been released.
Doing war on Iraq (for its oil) was always the end goal. Retroactively justifying it was pageantry.