I watched the Six Days in Fallujah gameplay trailer so nobody else has to.
Here's a quick video with live thoughts as I watched it, and more written out thoughts continue below:
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- The trailer starts with a US soldier telling about how they lost 2/3rd of their unit in the 2nd Siege of Fallujah with a Back to the Future style fade of a photo? I waited for any mention of Iraqi deaths, but there's only ragdolls there.
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- The first clearly spoken Arabic words spoken are "Allahu Akbar" (Shooting ensues)
- The game has a tactical squad system similar to Binary Domain-style game design (contextual point and command).
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- "The 'Go' command makes it as easy to command your team as it is to fire your weapon" really shows what their 'design verbs' were, and that they consider pulling the trigger very easy. It's not real humans you're shooting anyway I guess.
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- "The person who goes in first is never wrong" is an thing said by a US soldier here, before adding, "they have the most to fear" - absolutely erasing the fact that the person in the house has the most to fear and the "person who goes in first" killed quite some innocent Iraqis.
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- "And as soon as I walk in, I see a machine gun right in front of my face, maybe ten feet feet, fifteen feet from me" is a thing not said by an Iraqi but by a US soldier.
- Tense music is building, "room clearing, house clearing, it's different every time". This leads into:
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- They have literally randomized the city of Fallujah so that "you never know what's behind the door". Have to admit that heroically murdering Muslims/Arab/Middle Eastern folks but make it procedural is new.
- We are literally not human enough to hand-design anymore.
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I cannot summarize how much I loathe that real-life war crime victims are being procedurally placed in a procedurally generated version of a city that is still irradiated to this day so that players can have "just like actual combat" experience in this real war.
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- Apparently getting shot results in a red faded vignette indicating where you've been shot, so they're really pushing that "we want to give you the feeling of real combat here" to that "Call of Duty" level of realism.
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- There's a segment called "Fathers and Sons" that is about a US soldier's "worst day there", worrying about dying on their kids birthday. This is the same person that said "the person who goes in first is never wrong". No mention of Iraqis who were murdered having a worse day.
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- There is literally a horror-style "down into the basement" sequence that ends with a Iraqi family jumping up from behind the couch and the soldier having a conversation with them about why they're still in the city. The trailer glitches to Iraqi civilians talking.
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- The trailer has anonymized Iraqi civilians blaming Iraqi civilians' staying behind in Fallujah solely on "Iraqi stubbornness" with absolutely no mention of the documented and self-admitted context of the US military denying escape to military-age men.
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- No language in the gameplay at all, so I can't tell if they fucked up rendering the Arabic in Iraq.
- No mention of white phosphorus or any war crimes, the US soldiers represented here are portrayed as "heroes" and "fallen heroes" only. There is zero mention of civilian death.
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Summary: Six Days in Fallujah is a 2001-design tactical squad FPS with insincere marketing about "telling the true story" and "you had to be there" while literally having Call of Duty damage vignettes and procedural generation of war crime victims.
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