Should RON provide the "why" for Elephant?

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, and if a member of the team was curious they would just have to speculate or do some digging in their own time. We facilitate some of this "digging" via the evidence locker, but ultimately I think it's a really interesting reflection of how it's handled in the real world. I'm sure there's a lot of frustration as to not truly knowing why.

I understand this can come off as a bit too nebulous and because of this, Elephant could be seen as a piece of shock value content to be talked about, but that certainly was never our intent.

The mission's purpose was to reflect an unfortunate, reoccurring issue in the United States. We also wanted to attempt to convey the unique difficulty of mitigating an active shooting in a school, all the while using it as a way to show that even in the new generation of Los Suenans, things aren't looking optimistic. The cycle of violence within the city is just going to keep getting worse and worse until the whole damn place collapses in on itself, metaphorically.

Did we do a good job? We could have done better, but it was by far the hardest level to create, to the point where it was actually being considered to be cut because we couldn't achieve what we wanted for quite a while.