This winter, Electronic Arts will be releasing the follow up to the “love it or hate it” third person shooter, Army of Two, called Army of Two: The 40^th Day.

One of the major complaints from the original game was that the protagonists, Rios and Salem, were in fact a generally unlikable pair of douchebags with little in the way or morals or conscience.

How is EA handing these two this time around?  Fist bump with me after the jump.

When the original Army of Two came out, I was all excited to hear about game fashioned after a pair of Army Rangers who were working for a private military contractor.  Go Rangers!

I figured, in my self delusional way that I do when I look forward to a game that depicts any kind of facet of military life, that they would pay someone to as an adviser to make the game more realistic.

Well, I’m not sure who they got as their adviser for the characters Salem and Rios, but Jesus, every time the immoral asshat Salem opened his mouth, I wanted to throw my Xbox controller at the television.  After going through the entire game, hating myself for my stupid inability to quit until I finished the damn thing, I felt like I needed to take a shower.  It felt like I was playing the equivalent of a jock fraternity bully, who made dick and fart jokes while blowing people’s heads off.

I had no intention of playing the sequel when it came out.  For those of you that follow my work, story line is big for me.  To sit through another ten hour campaign of the air guitaring, fist pounding jagoffs pimping their assault rifles and generally insulting my intelligence would be painful.  Especially if they haven’t fixed the atrocious partner AI and rather repetitive gameplay.

Apparently, however, enough reviewers blasted EA for the dipshit duo’s bromance antics that they apparently decided to listen and make some tweaks to the new franchise.  Given the big success and spamming of recent games, and their use of morality driven story choices, EA decided that Salem and Rios would be given the opportunity to make moral choices throughout the new game.

Taken directly from the USA Today article:

Instead, developers of Army of Two: The 40th Day, published by Electronic Arts, are toning down the duo’s antics, opting to focus on a more organic co-op experience.

Developers say The 40th Day will place more emphasis on co-op morality.  The game will be filled with key moral choices that they expect players to argue over during the experience.  One example shown was choosing whether to kill a scared security guard and take a stash of weapons or search for guns elsewhere.

That’s great and all — giving the players a choice between good and evil will help tone down their stupidity — but are the characters still inherent jackasses?  Has EA gone through and completely revamped both characters to be more serious and less like a pair of 15 year olds playing a game of paintball?  The problem was the voice acting was great during the game, and you could really hear it in their dialogue that these guys were hard to like.  It would take some serious revamping from EA to change these guys, and I don’t think that EA is going to allow that to happen.

For myself, I am and have always been a “good” player, in the sense that I will always play as the good guy in a given situation, so if I deign to force myself to play this game (which I undoubtedly will), I will be interested to see if these two human apes can act like responsible adults when given the choice.

For those of you out there who enjoy burning ants with a magnifying glass, I’m sure you’ll get to see the pair in all their douchebagy gloriousness, with Salem slurping beer from the skull of a decapitated nun while Rios headbangs to some power chords only he can hear.

Look, I’m not expecting them to hold any kind of prayer circle for the battalions of mercenaries they’ll undoubtedly have to mow down to complete their objectives, but a little spark of remorse or touch of humanity would be nice.

Source: USA Today

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