There's a bit of backstory detail to the mission which was quite hard to tell in-game, so ultimately we left it open. A major goal for the level was to keep it quite vague, not pointing to any specific rationale. You might pick up on some different reasons from the various shooters' voice lines, but we wanted to avoid saying "this is the reason shootings happen", pointing to any specific motive. In fact; Albert, Chase, and Archie (the three shooters within the narrative) all have their own reasons for committing the WCC Shooting, but it's steeped in so much backstory and internal conflict that pretty much none of what we wrote was able to make it into the game given how we present situations to the player from the SWAT perspective.
It's an unfortunate side effect of the game we've produced: as a member of a tactical team, your job isn't to know the why, it's knowing the "what". In a lot of briefings I was supplied with from real teams, they never went into that,...
Read more