Your assignment in this chapter is to file three articles profiling one soldier apiece, articles you're going to sell to their hometown newspapers. You can do the articles on any of the soldiers in the squad. As they go about their duties you find opportunities to ask them questions and get them to open up. If the situation is right, they will. If it's the wrong time or the conversation goes poorly, their opinion of you drops. But as you persuade some of them, they may come into conflict with their fellow soldiers whose opinions of you haven't changed yet. You need to find opportunities to get them alone where their buddies won't razz them for talking with you.
Conversations don't just improve your relationships. Successful dialogues unlock Sound Bites, which are moments when the soldier says something particularly interesting or revealing. Even soldiers who dislike you can supply sound bites, though they are likely to be colorful ones.
A thriving black market can supply you with cigarettes, magazines, videogames and other trinkets you can share with the soldiers to improve their opinion of you or just distract them so you can talk to someone else alone. You need to earn money to shop on the black market, though, and you can do that with the photography feature.
Starting with your default camera, you can take two kinds of pictures: Photo Ops and Opportunity Shots. A photo op is a situation the game stages for your benefit. It might be a group of soldiers playing poker on the hood of a jeep or a young Iraqi kid drinking Coca-Cola. The photo ops are scripted to happen in certain locations and times. At the beginning, you only get brief notice of an impending photo op and only when it's close by. As you advance through the game your proximity radius and early notice of photo ops both improve, but they also become more challenging to pull off. They become little mini-games where you have to race through the base, solve a climbing puzzle to get the right perspective for the shot, or use your black-market trinkets to distract the guards who won't let you through. Once you're in the right place at the right time, you line up the shot with the viewfinder and snap the picture.
You can take opportunity shots at any time. We apply scores to elements in the game such as soldiers, vehicles, civilians, even particle effects, and then rate your photo on the basis of what elements are present in the viewfinder at the moment you snap a picture. Situations modify these scores. Six guys and a tank sitting in the base doesn't make for a great photo, but six guys and a tank in a firefight is worth plenty of points. Since we're using Source for the facial expressions, we know at any moment what emotions are on screen and so we can even apply scores to those - angry, cheerful or heartbroken soldiers are worth more. Over time you can buy better cameras and accessories on the black market so you can zoom, use dramatic depth of field, and get low-light shots. These accessories unlock even more photo ops that aren't available to you otherwise.
As the first chapter unfolds, you go on a couple of missions with the squad. They're initially pretty quiet, fruitless searches and desert patrols, but soon firefights erupt. These are great for opportunity shots and it's even possible to improve your relationship with the troops while under fire. But these are also the dangerous portions of the game, as careless play can get you shot. You have the ability to draw attention by yelling, which you can do if you need help or if you want to warn the soldiers about something you can see. When you're injured, you black out and wake up back at the base minus some money.
