I will say that too many stealth games immediately trigger enemy base-wide alerts or even game overs as soon as you are spotted, without even giving you a chance to subdue whoever it was that spotted you
I kinda have this problem with MGSV. It's not a particularly difficult game or anything like that, even with the movie sense off, but it feels really weird that guards don't have to reach for their walkie talkies to actually report information in.
And naturally I'd expect that knocking out a guard while he's mid-conversation would trigger an immediate investigation too. It ends up feeling like something that's been overlooked in such an otherwise detailed game.
The problem of MGSV is that health regeneration is way too forgiving and the ai is not that good in combat so there's.not much incentive in going stealth other that inmersion
By giving options, promote creativity rather than hiding in a bush and whistling until the enemies come over and you pick em off one by one. All stealth games should learn from MGS V where there are so many ways to be stealthy.
Better AI on alert guards and some randomization to their routine during patrol. Maybe they decided to stop and take a smoke break in the middle because nobody is watching the watchman which prevents the player from KNOWING where the npcs are.
An enhanced AI would also probably make the games run worse, though, like how Todd's famous cutting-edge Radiant AI made Oblivion run like ass while one NPC made it their life mission to steal ALL the bread.
It wasn't really the radiant AI that made Oblivion run like shit, it was the outdated 32 bit engine they used that was repurposed from Morrowind which was already outdated by then.
Go back to Thief 1 and 2 and try to build something from there. Looking Glass got it about as close to being perfect as they could back in 1998. It's why Chaos Theory is so good, they just copied a bunch of Thief shit and then added some more mechanics.
>Looking Glass got it about as close to being perfect as they could back in 1998
I feel their work is overrated. There are ideas to pull from but the execution itself is not solid.
Disagree. Your webm is showing off someone playing Thief badly. However they have discovered some tricks that you can spam in combat to win. In Thief you're really not supposed to get into combat ever if you're playing right, but if you do it is possible to beat maybe one or two guards. Any more than that and you're completely fricked though and you'll have to think fast and come up with an escape route on the fly. Problem is that they're games from the late 90s so there are a few oversights and techniques that you can spam the frick out of to win combat. But even then the design's so free-form that you can totally go in and murder-hobo a whole level and the game won't slap the controls away from and tell you to do it again but properly.
Look I get that people get filtered by Thief but I think you just played it wrong dude.
People that say Thief is somehow one of the best stealth games are hard to take seriously. It's like they enjoyed the experience or atmosphere and that clouds their view on the actual mechanics and AI which are as boring and predictable as they get.
It's one thing to say that the devs can't account for bunnyhopping. It's another thing to say that it's impossible for devs to account for "what if someone just runs up and clubs the guards?"
>muh board
Not an argument. Thief is like the pac-man of stealth games, it's a fine game but too simple.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I apologies. Your posts specifically are the stupidest things I've ever fricking read. You're so wrong I cannot even fathom a response. I'll just leave this image of Randy Smith's breakdown of Thief's core systems. You're just so wrong that I need the actual devs to break down why you're wrong, y'know.
It's one thing to say that the devs can't account for bunnyhopping. It's another thing to say that it's impossible for devs to account for "what if someone just runs up and clubs the guards?"
Well that isn't a terrible point. I will say that the webm you posted seems to be using full TFix which fricks up the AI. Fricking Voodoo47... I swear the dude's an idiot. And he won't fricking change it. Basically he imported a bunch of Thief 2 shit into Thief 1 without realizing that it fundamentally changed the game. The AI in Thief 1 is a lot less forgiving. They changed that in Thief 2 due to the more sprawling levels but its a mixed bag, especially when you bring it into Thief 1. It's so bad that I'd argue you're not really playing Thief 1 anymore. Again, if that's your webm I don't blame you though. Voodoo47's a frickwit and I blame him.
With that said, you're still supposed to avoid conflict. The gameplay there is someone abusing the late 90s AI oversights to murder-hobo their way to victory in a game where the whole point is to avoid conflict. So far we've just talked about the combat.... which is shit. It's always been shit, even at the time. The actual stealth mechanics are what still hold up, mostly the sound system which is still unsurpassed. I just don't get your argument.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>I Apologize
frickin' autocorrect
2 years ago
Anonymous
>thief is actually complex because it takes into account lighting and sound and has different states for the AI, like every single fricking stealth game ever created
That image is essentially just the basics of stealth games as a whole apart from the Thief specific items, but most stealth games have items/tools that alter visibility and sound so you could easily swap that out. You literally proved my point. It's designed well but the design is so basic that it's not interesting. The rope bow is like the only thing in Thief that actually stands out.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Actually no. As far as sound goes and how AI reacts to it, Thief 1 and 2 are still better than anything that came after it. Especially with A3D support, which sadly doesn't work with anything other than Windows 98 (fricking Creative are the worst I swear,) a sound driver that allowed for true spatial 3D audio, including vertical sound sources. Thief was designed around A3D but sadly again, you can't get it to work without getting a time machine and an Aureal Vortex 2 card. Even without that Thief's sound propogation and the way AI reacts to every single footstep and the way every single surface is makes a different level of noise is still far, far, far more complex than anything that came after it.
And that's just the fricking sound. Thief's a really interesting game once you start really fricking around in it. The devs literally thought of everything, but in a modular kinda reactive way rather anything pre-scripted. Don't get me wrong, it's a clunky old game from the late 90s and you have to get over some 90s jank, a general lack of direction and flat-out bad default control bindings. But as far as stealth goes it's still the undisputed champ. It's still even better than Chaos Theory, although I will admit CT is a lot easier to get into these days and is brilliant in its own ways as well.
you're right and I remember people being filtered like this when the game first released, they go into it like an action combat game and then complain when it's not very good, it's like no shit dude it's not fricking dark camelot
People that say Thief is somehow one of the best stealth games are hard to take seriously. It's like they enjoyed the experience or atmosphere and that clouds their view on the actual mechanics and AI which are as boring and predictable as they get.
If you land a blackjack on the neck, no matter if its aware or not they will get KO...
Never tried that?
Also in T1 you get the aereal takedown score for doing the shit you saw in the reboot, vid related i just did.
Try swording your way out of escape, and you will learn a thing or two.
Dosent change the combat, the first guard he sees would had gone in huntmode right there and the second one aswell just for the footsteps, but the combat would had been the same. >try this against a hammer haunt with a sword
If you know the combat is doable >try this against a hammer haunt with a hammer
Thats where everything goes to shit
Yeah but that was because Ion Storm just suddenly went the say the dodo. Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2 were huge hits for Looking Glass. The first game saved the company and the 2nd game could've saved it if the fricking royalty cheque had cleared in time. What are you talking about? That red light-green light shit? Thief's almost entirely sound based. Just throw something or make some loud some loud noise in another room and you'll attract every guard in a 3 block radius, allowing you to slip past wherever they're supposed to be guarding unopposed.
Mechanically there isn't a whole lot left to do with the genre. You can make the AI a bit more sophisticated, you can employ guard patrol change ups on alarms. We've got shadows, sound meters, line of sight, cover, peeking, gadgets to peek under doors, around corners for added safety. Distractions such as whistles, malfunctioning equipment, utilizing weather etc. Its pretty much all been done. Only real thing that hasn't been fully explored is what MGSV started. Open world stealth operations has big potential, even if I'm really sick and tired of open world. You would need to create a bunch of proper stealth levels, put them in the world and then have the world be good enough to allow stealth and escapes too.
Nah. Crouching and being stationary makes sense of course but crouch walking requires more exertion than just regular walking. You also have to try and keep up the same pace leading to more noise.
You can skip the wait time or even fast forward through all the dialogue by pressing/holding one of the buttons (I don't remember if it was A or B). Then it's only slow when you have to wait for a scripted song to stop.
Add true stealth, knocking out and/or killing people and hiding the body shouldnt be viable, patrols or sentries should realize that a sentry or a patrol is missing
Stealth is way too trial and error based in games. The only good stealth sections that exist in games are in areas you already know because you have been there before and know potential hiding spots or potential routes and enemies only come in later at a point where you are familiar with the terrain.
Stealth sections in areas unknown to you will never be fun unless you enjoy trial and error.
>Stealth sections in areas unknown to you will never be fun unless you enjoy trial and error.
Not true if the game gives you the tools that reward proceeding with caution, like using a snake cam to see under doors.
Except combat was braindead easy and there weren't even difficulty options to make it harder. Also there was so much fricking visual clutter I didn't even notice the people that spotted me half the time.
the difficulty increases with every target you kill, the final loop is insanely hard but either way they coped out and added difficulty options. >visual clutter
there's an audio cue that plays when you are spotted and complementary combat music
Is there a game where if you create too many distractions such as whistling or throwing a rock, the enemies will call for backup before checking out the spot?
>Sit in corner for 180 seconds >"Now's my chance" >Quick Save >Manual Save >Backup hard drive to the Cloud >Walk forward 10 steps >Get detected by guard you didn't know was there >"Oh dam, time to try again" >Wait 180 seconds in a corner
Amazing gameplay, 10/10. Don't forget to add a shit ton of weapons only to then scold the player if they ever dare to use them.
Is there a game where if you create too many distractions such as whistling or throwing a rock, the enemies will call for backup before checking out the spot?
MGSV/GZ had guards call in to HQ to report them investigating noises. If you took the guard out before they radioed back in and confirmed nothing is wrong, then HQ would send back up to check on the missing guard.
If you want a medieval stealth game, try a plague tale innocence, it's short but pretty good, you can sneak around or kill guards using alchemy and magic rats
Pure thief style? the dark mod is the closest you can get to the OG games and has a shit ton of fan missions but no actual "story"
Pure medieval? kingdom come deliverance, i wish i was joking but the stealth is pretty decent for what it is, clothes color makes you more or less visible and if you are running on plate armor you make more noise.
its probably up to indie games at this point since the AAA audience is far too zoomy and lacking in attention-span to enjoy a stealth game, need more Mark of the Ninja games in the world for sure. But my biggest suggestion in general would be to focus hard on atmosphere and immersion. Those types of games tend to get cult followings at the very least, and stealth being a genre that requires studying your environment benefits greatly from that.
Another thing too is the fans need to stop walking over themselves, you will have purists state that thief/chaos theory are the only true stealth games and everything else is trash. While those games are good you can certainly broaden your horizons, stealth can be so much more than sitting in dark corners.
Splinter Cell/Thief are masters of light and noise stealth. MGS early days were great at a more arcadey, faster stealth which then grew into being an excellent environmental camouflage stealth series. Hitman and hell even Assassins creed in it's early days are excellent at social stealth, blending in to crowds and walking in plain sight etc.
>Thing that's good is actually bad! >Thing that's bad is actually good! >Written by Chris Bergenblattz, pop culture critic, @Bergenblattz on twitter >he/him, loves cats, public transport, #hopenothate
Journalists should all be lined up against the wall and shot.
Stealth doesn't suck, bad Stealth sucks, and the problem is most Stealth is bad Stealth because it's hard to do.
Bad Stealth locks you into one way of solving a problem and not doing it is a failure state. Bad Stealth has unresponsive systems and opposition. It becomes a matter of rote rather than application of mechanics.
Games like thief and splinter cell were good Stealth games because they gave you a wide variety of tools to use and enemies that were responsive to your actions.
>you see if you press this button exactly when the band starts to play it will lure the target to this spot where you can cut the wire holding a 10t block of granite in the air dropping it on the targets dog which will make him so depressed he's going to throw himself off the nearby balcony >suit in, suit out, no disguise, no weapons, no detection
this kind of gAmEpLaY was already getting old and boring in blood money.
Make it so that getting spotted once doesn't mean you're location is constantly known, that only makes sense if it's like payday but if your in a facility and you get spotted but you kill the guy who alerted everyone and get away, they should be on alert
Stealth sucks no matter what. All of the mechanics used to facilitate stealth in dedicated "stealth games" are a joke.
Early Metal Gear's tiny cones of vision.
Later Metal Gear's camo. (simultaneously the worst and the best of the worst*)
Splinter Cell and Thief's magical pitch black darkness everywhere and AI with zero vertical range of vision.
Hitman's extremely generous disguise effectiveness and everyone having such low suspicion letting you just waltz around.
There is better stealth in random action games than there is in what are supposed to be the staple titles of the genre.
Also there's little more I hate than a fricking "stealth mode" requiring you to do some moronic ass crouch-walk or crawling around while standing suddenly makes you a shining beacon to everyone in line of sight. That kind of shit makes way more noise, disturbs the area under you and is far more draining than just a simple normal walk.
*The camo of MGS3&4 was moronic mostly because they were in very tiny spaces and skewed the camo index too hard between prone and standing, causing the aforementioned annoying "stealth mode"-like shit taken to an extreme.
But MGSV actually came closest to nailing the levels of effectiveness of good camouflage and more nonchalant yet still stealthy movement, as well as giving enemy soldiers reasonable levels of awareness and fields of view. When they even so much as caught a glimpse at you, they often yelled out immediately. Patrols could notice you from a good distance and watchtower spotters/snipers could spot you from ~200m away. Of course this only applies to when you're wearing camo fatigues; it all goes to shit as soon as you unlock the Sneaking Suit. It brings you right back to MGS3 style sneaking where you could run around, dive prone when needed, and guards were always wondering what they saw for a good half minute before calling anything in.
Ghosts of Tsushima must be the worst stealth game ever then. I started it yesterday and there’s so many clusters of enemies where it’s impossible to sneak up to them without alerting the group
Stealth games need to be more player-action oriented. Not action in shooting people, but there's a difference between a game like Hitman which has constant player engagement with every choice and action, and a game like Splinter Cell which involves a lot of waiting for the AI. There's no skill involved in waiting, except trying my patience. One hones their patience to be professional, not for entertainment.
Honestly a mix of Tenchu, MGS V and NuHitman is the solution >Tenchu
Using the environment around you to your advantage, guards can't see you if your hiding on the rooftops, but when forced into a confined space your tools allow for hiding behind cover and getting into awkward nooks to hide in close quarters >MGS V
The actual mechanics of physically sneaking(speed, height, noise, lines of sight, light and dark, camouflage) are near perfect add NPC interactions like the Pin Ups or food from previous games and have the AI act more human like. I.E. >Radio communications being cut halfway through a conversation should cause a general alert >Certain AI interact with certain objectives on their cycle, the way a player chooses or has to interact with them affect their alert cycle (Taking a picture of a Document causes no alert but stealing the document does) >A snow level where the player leaves prints and if they cross paths with an NPC's path the NPC will follow the new path and sound a general alert while they investigate
Essentially just an iteration and improvement of MGS V would be the base for a great game that was narrowed in scope >Hitman
Social stealth is an option for dealing with lower levels of security, if the player is able to stealthily aquire a disguise the player should have free access to certain areas provided they act similarly to an NPC, however if an alert was raised while acquiring the disguise NPC's should be suspicious and officers that can reveal the disguise should be deployed to catch the player. Also using observation and player intelligence should alow the player to get past security measures by direct means rather than just picking up a security card and walking in, say listening to a conversation reveals the password to a terminal that the player has to figure out the exact word that was relevant.
i think the problem with combining mgsv's psychical sneaking and hitman's social stealth is that at they are both CORE mechanic's of their respective games and that trying to two different CORE mechanics would leave each less developed.
also in hitman sometimes i enjoy the "no disguise" runs a little more due to increased difficulty. a problem with nu hitman social stealth is that it can sometimes be a little to easy once you know what your doing and have the right suit. in no suit run i would use coins and bullet shots, dropped weapons (forcing guards to pick them up and place them in a box) to distract various guards.
i think a good part of stealth games should be having enemies be predictable so you can manipulate them .
I’ve known this since what feels forever that stealth amounts to tip toeing around the same moronic a.i.’s and never amounts to FUN.
You fix stealth by making it FUN. MGS is the only series that managed to do it. The only one, and even then in MGSTPP it was just more convenient to go in guns blazing 95% of the times.
I agree that stealth sucks, and hate it when it comes up in things like Zelda.
I do, however, admit that's just me and my tastes in gaming, and avoid it when I can. Different strokes for different folks, and all that.
Honestly stealth is most tense in multi-player games
Nothing like hiding from a full team hunting you down and you trying to hide in a spot hoping not to be found, NPCs feel too predictable and static in comparison
>not pandering to short attention span homosexuals >keep it niche so they dont frick it up with the "we want a wider audience" bullshit >dont put them on consoles because every single fricking time that fricked something up, from the controls to the gameplay mechanics for the first 2 reasons among others
>New stealth games; >Wield universe crushing magical powers to teleport, turn invisible, and instantly kill whole armies of enemies in the blink of an eye!
I have no idea why stealth games suck anymore. It's truly baffling.
For a direct example of both of these game styles in a single game try the first Styx game. You can play deadly or you can truly ghost it; highest difficulty, no magical abilities, not even any knockouts. Just careful movement and distractions to create windows. You can go the whole game without ever attacking anything except for the final boss fight right at the end.
Or you can use all your abilities, race through the level and kill everything, even on the harder difficulties that make you auto-lose melee combat you can still kill the absolute frick out of everything, and it just isn't as good a game. There's no tension, you always have the upper hand, you're never disadvantaged because being able to make clones and use other weird abilities like invisibility and shit just totally destroys any and all "stealth" from the game.
Most modern stealth titles just ignore the actual stealth, "Oh the main character has a scarf over their face? Must be a stealth game" that's about as deep as it gets. People calling shit like the new Thief title or Dishonoured STEALTH GAMES when they play more like basic fricking shooters is absurd to me.
DON'T FORGET TO PRESS X FOR THAT EEEPPPIIICCC STEALTH KILL BRO! QUICK USE THE BODY MELTING POTION TO MAKE IT CLEAN! WOW! NICE! MULTIKILL COMBO!
In my eyes, the main issue with stealth games isn't that they only make sense when you play them with a sense of self-imposed rules to ignore all the overpowered tools/exploits/mechanics, but rather that they all tend towards perfectionism instead of improvisation (which is IMO when stealth games are at their most tense, like in multiplayer stealth games). Namely:
1) Stealth games tend to extremely punish you for making extremely small mistakes in the form of permanent level-wide raised awareness for all NPCs, forcing you to wait a significant time for NPCs to go back to their original state, or simply (almost) killing you outright. Here the true health bar isn't your actual health bar, but it's how long it takes for you to get spotted (and have the alarms be raised)
2) Stealth games tend to give you the ability to freely quicksave/load, thus letting you freely bruteforce a solution where you don't suffer long-term consequences
3) Stealth games aren't very action-intensive; by design a lot of patience and waiting, but having to repeat that after a game over gets on people's nerves, which they would rather avoid. Although waiting is necessary for the atmosphere, even horror games lose their sense of atmosphere if you are forced to retry a certain portion several times
And most importantly:
4) Stealth games have a razor-thin margin of error while at the same time having very long levels, often with no clear checkpoints. It's like trying to play Super Meat Boy but each level is 20+ minutes long and has several parts where you are simply waiting for a platform to appear in the right position.
Even if you'd take away savescumming in favor of checkpoints, you'd run the risk of making players feel more frustrated due to all the other aforementioned factors, now that they do not have the means to skip the waiting/runbacks (like in Souls games). Stealth game conventions would need to be radically rethought to address these issues.
Stealth games shouldn't let you permanently disable guards to begin with. Why would you make a game around manipulating enemy AI, and then give you the option to remove the AI outright? You should only be able to temporarily disable them, and even then your means of doing so should be limited either by making it very hard to do or tying it to a scarce resource.
Snipe Elite is actually decent stealth game
but instead hiding in shadow like ninja undetected its more like
OH SHIT THERE IS SNIPER EVERYONE GET DOWN AND FIND HI
kind of stealth
stop pushing ghosting as being the peak way to play >no interacting with enemies or assets at all
that shit is so boring
it's like playing a walking sim
I liked all the whacky shit you could do in MGS3 like destroy the enemy's supplies, throw animals at them, all the stupid shit you could do with their bodies like interrogating them, holding them up and shaking them down, dragging their bodies around and throwing them into hazards like electric fences, or feeding them to crocs
if you make a game where all you can do is just avoid enemies or maybe execute takedowns it gets old fricking fast
stealth sucks when it's not the core aspect
maybe stop making games about avoiding combat
wait is ghost of tsushima a stealth game ?
You can play stealthily or just run in and murder filthy Mongolians. It's actually tied to the story theme too.
By gatekeeping it.
add more platforming!
I will say that too many stealth games immediately trigger enemy base-wide alerts or even game overs as soon as you are spotted, without even giving you a chance to subdue whoever it was that spotted you
I kinda have this problem with MGSV. It's not a particularly difficult game or anything like that, even with the movie sense off, but it feels really weird that guards don't have to reach for their walkie talkies to actually report information in.
And naturally I'd expect that knocking out a guard while he's mid-conversation would trigger an immediate investigation too. It ends up feeling like something that's been overlooked in such an otherwise detailed game.
They do do that though. They've been doing that since MGS2.
The problem of MGSV is that health regeneration is way too forgiving and the ai is not that good in combat so there's.not much incentive in going stealth other that inmersion
Add anal sex mechanics
SUPRISE BUTTSECKS
By giving options, promote creativity rather than hiding in a bush and whistling until the enemies come over and you pick em off one by one. All stealth games should learn from MGS V where there are so many ways to be stealthy.
When your only experience of 'stealth' is from shit like nu-tomb raider, or last of us, then yeah I imagine you'd think stealth games suck.
Better AI on alert guards and some randomization to their routine during patrol. Maybe they decided to stop and take a smoke break in the middle because nobody is watching the watchman which prevents the player from KNOWING where the npcs are.
An enhanced AI would also probably make the games run worse, though, like how Todd's famous cutting-edge Radiant AI made Oblivion run like ass while one NPC made it their life mission to steal ALL the bread.
It wasn't really the radiant AI that made Oblivion run like shit, it was the outdated 32 bit engine they used that was repurposed from Morrowind which was already outdated by then.
stop using this moronic parroted idea. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Gamebryo
stealth games have always been superior to straight up third person shooters, there's no fixing required
by letting it die. Stealth has already peaked a long time ago and everything since has been watered down garbage
The problem with stealth games is that you are designing a game around AVOIDING gameplay instead of engaging in actual gameplay.
There are stealth games I love despite them being stealth games not because of.
Ps stealth in Dishonored was fun but very easy
Avoiding enemy patrols, learning the map and enemy movement patterns etc. is gameplay, this is stupid as frick.
>The problem with stealth games is that you are designing a game around AVOIDING gameplay instead of engaging in actual gameplay.
least intelligent post of the day
>IT'S NOT SHOOTY BOOM BOOM SO ITS NOT GAMEPLAY
>HIDE AND SEEK IS POORLY DESIGNED
What did the American mean by this?
Go back to Thief 1 and 2 and try to build something from there. Looking Glass got it about as close to being perfect as they could back in 1998. It's why Chaos Theory is so good, they just copied a bunch of Thief shit and then added some more mechanics.
>Looking Glass got it about as close to being perfect as they could back in 1998
I feel their work is overrated. There are ideas to pull from but the execution itself is not solid.
>le ebin webm
have a nice day immediately.
Disagree. Your webm is showing off someone playing Thief badly. However they have discovered some tricks that you can spam in combat to win. In Thief you're really not supposed to get into combat ever if you're playing right, but if you do it is possible to beat maybe one or two guards. Any more than that and you're completely fricked though and you'll have to think fast and come up with an escape route on the fly. Problem is that they're games from the late 90s so there are a few oversights and techniques that you can spam the frick out of to win combat. But even then the design's so free-form that you can totally go in and murder-hobo a whole level and the game won't slap the controls away from and tell you to do it again but properly.
Look I get that people get filtered by Thief but I think you just played it wrong dude.
>You played it wrong! You played it wrong!
Accept when a game is not balanced well. It won't kill you.
My god this board has gone to shit
It's one thing to say that the devs can't account for bunnyhopping. It's another thing to say that it's impossible for devs to account for "what if someone just runs up and clubs the guards?"
>muh board
Not an argument. Thief is like the pac-man of stealth games, it's a fine game but too simple.
I apologies. Your posts specifically are the stupidest things I've ever fricking read. You're so wrong I cannot even fathom a response. I'll just leave this image of Randy Smith's breakdown of Thief's core systems. You're just so wrong that I need the actual devs to break down why you're wrong, y'know.
Well that isn't a terrible point. I will say that the webm you posted seems to be using full TFix which fricks up the AI. Fricking Voodoo47... I swear the dude's an idiot. And he won't fricking change it. Basically he imported a bunch of Thief 2 shit into Thief 1 without realizing that it fundamentally changed the game. The AI in Thief 1 is a lot less forgiving. They changed that in Thief 2 due to the more sprawling levels but its a mixed bag, especially when you bring it into Thief 1. It's so bad that I'd argue you're not really playing Thief 1 anymore. Again, if that's your webm I don't blame you though. Voodoo47's a frickwit and I blame him.
With that said, you're still supposed to avoid conflict. The gameplay there is someone abusing the late 90s AI oversights to murder-hobo their way to victory in a game where the whole point is to avoid conflict. So far we've just talked about the combat.... which is shit. It's always been shit, even at the time. The actual stealth mechanics are what still hold up, mostly the sound system which is still unsurpassed. I just don't get your argument.
>I Apologize
frickin' autocorrect
>thief is actually complex because it takes into account lighting and sound and has different states for the AI, like every single fricking stealth game ever created
That image is essentially just the basics of stealth games as a whole apart from the Thief specific items, but most stealth games have items/tools that alter visibility and sound so you could easily swap that out. You literally proved my point. It's designed well but the design is so basic that it's not interesting. The rope bow is like the only thing in Thief that actually stands out.
Actually no. As far as sound goes and how AI reacts to it, Thief 1 and 2 are still better than anything that came after it. Especially with A3D support, which sadly doesn't work with anything other than Windows 98 (fricking Creative are the worst I swear,) a sound driver that allowed for true spatial 3D audio, including vertical sound sources. Thief was designed around A3D but sadly again, you can't get it to work without getting a time machine and an Aureal Vortex 2 card. Even without that Thief's sound propogation and the way AI reacts to every single footstep and the way every single surface is makes a different level of noise is still far, far, far more complex than anything that came after it.
And that's just the fricking sound. Thief's a really interesting game once you start really fricking around in it. The devs literally thought of everything, but in a modular kinda reactive way rather anything pre-scripted. Don't get me wrong, it's a clunky old game from the late 90s and you have to get over some 90s jank, a general lack of direction and flat-out bad default control bindings. But as far as stealth goes it's still the undisputed champ. It's still even better than Chaos Theory, although I will admit CT is a lot easier to get into these days and is brilliant in its own ways as well.
you're a complete moron for even browsing Ganker in 2022
you're right and I remember people being filtered like this when the game first released, they go into it like an action combat game and then complain when it's not very good, it's like no shit dude it's not fricking dark camelot
People that say Thief is somehow one of the best stealth games are hard to take seriously. It's like they enjoyed the experience or atmosphere and that clouds their view on the actual mechanics and AI which are as boring and predictable as they get.
Try this on expert.
unless expert makes the enemies' animations faster, it wouldn't change anything.
>he's never played expert Thief
embaressing
record your own gameplay then
The enemies are more aggressive and it takes dozens of hits with the blackjack to take out a single enemy aware of your presence.
If you land a blackjack on the neck, no matter if its aware or not they will get KO...
Never tried that?
Also in T1 you get the aereal takedown score for doing the shit you saw in the reboot, vid related i just did.
Try swording your way out of escape, and you will learn a thing or two.
Dosent change the combat, the first guard he sees would had gone in huntmode right there and the second one aswell just for the footsteps, but the combat would had been the same.
>try this against a hammer haunt with a sword
If you know the combat is doable
>try this against a hammer haunt with a hammer
Thats where everything goes to shit
>Red light green light stealth
Miss me with that homosexualry. There's a reason it's a dead series.
I'm pretty sure it was this but okay
Thief was dead long before this cash grab came out
Yeah but that was because Ion Storm just suddenly went the say the dodo. Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2 were huge hits for Looking Glass. The first game saved the company and the 2nd game could've saved it if the fricking royalty cheque had cleared in time. What are you talking about? That red light-green light shit? Thief's almost entirely sound based. Just throw something or make some loud some loud noise in another room and you'll attract every guard in a 3 block radius, allowing you to slip past wherever they're supposed to be guarding unopposed.
Make guards blind.
>zoomies dont have the patience to watch enemy patrols and weave through them
>ITS NOT MY FAULT! GENRE BAD!!!
What a surprise
>How do we fix the Stealth genre?!
no more crouch walking
no more vent crawling
more subterfuge
>no more crouch walking
I know this is going to sound moronic, but does this actually help with being stealthy irl?
Mechanically there isn't a whole lot left to do with the genre. You can make the AI a bit more sophisticated, you can employ guard patrol change ups on alarms. We've got shadows, sound meters, line of sight, cover, peeking, gadgets to peek under doors, around corners for added safety. Distractions such as whistles, malfunctioning equipment, utilizing weather etc. Its pretty much all been done. Only real thing that hasn't been fully explored is what MGSV started. Open world stealth operations has big potential, even if I'm really sick and tired of open world. You would need to create a bunch of proper stealth levels, put them in the world and then have the world be good enough to allow stealth and escapes too.
Nah. Crouching and being stationary makes sense of course but crouch walking requires more exertion than just regular walking. You also have to try and keep up the same pace leading to more noise.
>have no stealth mechanics other than line of sight
>"stealth sux"
every fricking time
I finished ghost babel yesterday and it was really good.
It's way better than it fricking deserves to be, even though the dialog fricking crawls along.
You can skip the wait time or even fast forward through all the dialogue by pressing/holding one of the buttons (I don't remember if it was A or B). Then it's only slow when you have to wait for a scripted song to stop.
>stealth sucks
>games pictured have bad stealth
well, yeah, play a good stealth game instead
/v/ros, I can't wait for Gloomwood to release.
>early access
oof
Stealth doesn't suck you just don't like it.
Stealth only sucks if the talents and mechanics aren't well thought out.
Add true stealth, knocking out and/or killing people and hiding the body shouldnt be viable, patrols or sentries should realize that a sentry or a patrol is missing
Stealth is way too trial and error based in games. The only good stealth sections that exist in games are in areas you already know because you have been there before and know potential hiding spots or potential routes and enemies only come in later at a point where you are familiar with the terrain.
Stealth sections in areas unknown to you will never be fun unless you enjoy trial and error.
>Stealth sections in areas unknown to you will never be fun unless you enjoy trial and error.
Not true if the game gives you the tools that reward proceeding with caution, like using a snake cam to see under doors.
Splinter Cell and what else? In Hitman the only noteworthy thing I ever saw through keyholes was a guy sniffing a girl's panties but nothing useful
Remove quicksave/quick load spam
thissssssss
deathloop really raised the stakes by doing this, made it more intense and fun
Except combat was braindead easy and there weren't even difficulty options to make it harder. Also there was so much fricking visual clutter I didn't even notice the people that spotted me half the time.
the difficulty increases with every target you kill, the final loop is insanely hard but either way they coped out and added difficulty options.
>visual clutter
there's an audio cue that plays when you are spotted and complementary combat music
Is there a game where if you create too many distractions such as whistling or throwing a rock, the enemies will call for backup before checking out the spot?
>Sit in corner for 180 seconds
>"Now's my chance"
>Quick Save
>Manual Save
>Backup hard drive to the Cloud
>Walk forward 10 steps
>Get detected by guard you didn't know was there
>"Oh dam, time to try again"
>Wait 180 seconds in a corner
Amazing gameplay, 10/10. Don't forget to add a shit ton of weapons only to then scold the player if they ever dare to use them.
nice post, did your husband write it for you?
He did, he's playing a stealth game and waiting 10 mins for the guards to get in the right position before playing.
by not calling action games where you press crouch and turn invisible, and metal gear stealth games.
kek also desperados 3 added a fast forward feature so you only have to wait 90 seconds so you might be interested in that
Mark of the Ninja mogs all other stealth games.
speaking of, wtf happened to tenchu?
It became Sekiro.
MGSV/GZ had guards call in to HQ to report them investigating noises. If you took the guard out before they radioed back in and confirmed nothing is wrong, then HQ would send back up to check on the missing guard.
>almost 20 years old
>still unsurpassed in stealth genre
a stealth LOTR game, you gotta sneak all the way up to that big ass fire, i think it'd be neat.
If you want a medieval stealth game, try a plague tale innocence, it's short but pretty good, you can sneak around or kill guards using alchemy and magic rats
Pure thief style? the dark mod is the closest you can get to the OG games and has a shit ton of fan missions but no actual "story"
Pure medieval? kingdom come deliverance, i wish i was joking but the stealth is pretty decent for what it is, clothes color makes you more or less visible and if you are running on plate armor you make more noise.
fuark, looked up kingdom come and that shit looks right up my alley, thanks mate!
its probably up to indie games at this point since the AAA audience is far too zoomy and lacking in attention-span to enjoy a stealth game, need more Mark of the Ninja games in the world for sure. But my biggest suggestion in general would be to focus hard on atmosphere and immersion. Those types of games tend to get cult followings at the very least, and stealth being a genre that requires studying your environment benefits greatly from that.
Another thing too is the fans need to stop walking over themselves, you will have purists state that thief/chaos theory are the only true stealth games and everything else is trash. While those games are good you can certainly broaden your horizons, stealth can be so much more than sitting in dark corners.
Splinter Cell/Thief are masters of light and noise stealth. MGS early days were great at a more arcadey, faster stealth which then grew into being an excellent environmental camouflage stealth series. Hitman and hell even Assassins creed in it's early days are excellent at social stealth, blending in to crowds and walking in plain sight etc.
>Thing that's good is actually bad!
>Thing that's bad is actually good!
>Written by Chris Bergenblattz, pop culture critic, @Bergenblattz on twitter
>he/him, loves cats, public transport, #hopenothate
Journalists should all be lined up against the wall and shot.
Stealth doesn't suck, bad Stealth sucks, and the problem is most Stealth is bad Stealth because it's hard to do.
Bad Stealth locks you into one way of solving a problem and not doing it is a failure state. Bad Stealth has unresponsive systems and opposition. It becomes a matter of rote rather than application of mechanics.
Games like thief and splinter cell were good Stealth games because they gave you a wide variety of tools to use and enemies that were responsive to your actions.
"sleath sucks"
My brother in Christ you just suck at sleath games
>Stealth stucks
Hold on just a second.
>you see if you press this button exactly when the band starts to play it will lure the target to this spot where you can cut the wire holding a 10t block of granite in the air dropping it on the targets dog which will make him so depressed he's going to throw himself off the nearby balcony
>suit in, suit out, no disguise, no weapons, no detection
this kind of gAmEpLaY was already getting old and boring in blood money.
Make stealth games that are not shit. And don't let "journalists" who hate stealth games and suck at gaming in gerneral write about them.
Make it so that getting spotted once doesn't mean you're location is constantly known, that only makes sense if it's like payday but if your in a facility and you get spotted but you kill the guy who alerted everyone and get away, they should be on alert
so basically do what MGS got right 20 years ago
Good stealth games are hard to find.
Stealth sucks no matter what. All of the mechanics used to facilitate stealth in dedicated "stealth games" are a joke.
Early Metal Gear's tiny cones of vision.
Later Metal Gear's camo. (simultaneously the worst and the best of the worst*)
Splinter Cell and Thief's magical pitch black darkness everywhere and AI with zero vertical range of vision.
Hitman's extremely generous disguise effectiveness and everyone having such low suspicion letting you just waltz around.
There is better stealth in random action games than there is in what are supposed to be the staple titles of the genre.
Also there's little more I hate than a fricking "stealth mode" requiring you to do some moronic ass crouch-walk or crawling around while standing suddenly makes you a shining beacon to everyone in line of sight. That kind of shit makes way more noise, disturbs the area under you and is far more draining than just a simple normal walk.
*The camo of MGS3&4 was moronic mostly because they were in very tiny spaces and skewed the camo index too hard between prone and standing, causing the aforementioned annoying "stealth mode"-like shit taken to an extreme.
But MGSV actually came closest to nailing the levels of effectiveness of good camouflage and more nonchalant yet still stealthy movement, as well as giving enemy soldiers reasonable levels of awareness and fields of view. When they even so much as caught a glimpse at you, they often yelled out immediately. Patrols could notice you from a good distance and watchtower spotters/snipers could spot you from ~200m away. Of course this only applies to when you're wearing camo fatigues; it all goes to shit as soon as you unlock the Sneaking Suit. It brings you right back to MGS3 style sneaking where you could run around, dive prone when needed, and guards were always wondering what they saw for a good half minute before calling anything in.
make a game where you are a squid or octopus
dont give me the option to save state/load because i WILL spend 8 hours on every level trying to save scum a perfect run
Forced stealth in action games suck
Stealth games are good.
by making the player incredibly weak in combat, i.e. Thief series. In Sekiro stealth is just freebie damage/kills.
by understanding that stealth is an offshoot of dungeon crawler focusing on slow deliberate gameplay and returning to thief design
Ghosts of Tsushima must be the worst stealth game ever then. I started it yesterday and there’s so many clusters of enemies where it’s impossible to sneak up to them without alerting the group
ez fix
MGSV ruined MGS
Stealth games need to be more player-action oriented. Not action in shooting people, but there's a difference between a game like Hitman which has constant player engagement with every choice and action, and a game like Splinter Cell which involves a lot of waiting for the AI. There's no skill involved in waiting, except trying my patience. One hones their patience to be professional, not for entertainment.
Honestly a mix of Tenchu, MGS V and NuHitman is the solution
>Tenchu
Using the environment around you to your advantage, guards can't see you if your hiding on the rooftops, but when forced into a confined space your tools allow for hiding behind cover and getting into awkward nooks to hide in close quarters
>MGS V
The actual mechanics of physically sneaking(speed, height, noise, lines of sight, light and dark, camouflage) are near perfect add NPC interactions like the Pin Ups or food from previous games and have the AI act more human like. I.E.
>Radio communications being cut halfway through a conversation should cause a general alert
>Certain AI interact with certain objectives on their cycle, the way a player chooses or has to interact with them affect their alert cycle (Taking a picture of a Document causes no alert but stealing the document does)
>A snow level where the player leaves prints and if they cross paths with an NPC's path the NPC will follow the new path and sound a general alert while they investigate
Essentially just an iteration and improvement of MGS V would be the base for a great game that was narrowed in scope
>Hitman
Social stealth is an option for dealing with lower levels of security, if the player is able to stealthily aquire a disguise the player should have free access to certain areas provided they act similarly to an NPC, however if an alert was raised while acquiring the disguise NPC's should be suspicious and officers that can reveal the disguise should be deployed to catch the player. Also using observation and player intelligence should alow the player to get past security measures by direct means rather than just picking up a security card and walking in, say listening to a conversation reveals the password to a terminal that the player has to figure out the exact word that was relevant.
>food
what MGS has NPCs interact with food and how?
From MGS 3 if you destoryed a food depot you could use food to lure hungry guards i'm saying bring it back
in MGS3 in 2 ways, blow the storage to get them hungry, and then give them rotten food to make them die for it.
i think the problem with combining mgsv's psychical sneaking and hitman's social stealth is that at they are both CORE mechanic's of their respective games and that trying to two different CORE mechanics would leave each less developed.
also in hitman sometimes i enjoy the "no disguise" runs a little more due to increased difficulty. a problem with nu hitman social stealth is that it can sometimes be a little to easy once you know what your doing and have the right suit. in no suit run i would use coins and bullet shots, dropped weapons (forcing guards to pick them up and place them in a box) to distract various guards.
i think a good part of stealth games should be having enemies be predictable so you can manipulate them .
I’ve known this since what feels forever that stealth amounts to tip toeing around the same moronic a.i.’s and never amounts to FUN.
You fix stealth by making it FUN. MGS is the only series that managed to do it. The only one, and even then in MGSTPP it was just more convenient to go in guns blazing 95% of the times.
I agree that stealth sucks, and hate it when it comes up in things like Zelda.
I do, however, admit that's just me and my tastes in gaming, and avoid it when I can. Different strokes for different folks, and all that.
The only stealth gameplay I've liked has been in the Metal Gear games and Wind Waker. It's been pretty boring in most other games I've played.
Honestly stealth is most tense in multi-player games
Nothing like hiding from a full team hunting you down and you trying to hide in a spot hoping not to be found, NPCs feel too predictable and static in comparison
>not pandering to short attention span homosexuals
>keep it niche so they dont frick it up with the "we want a wider audience" bullshit
>dont put them on consoles because every single fricking time that fricked something up, from the controls to the gameplay mechanics for the first 2 reasons among others
>Old stealth games;
>Don't be seen
>New stealth games;
>Wield universe crushing magical powers to teleport, turn invisible, and instantly kill whole armies of enemies in the blink of an eye!
I have no idea why stealth games suck anymore. It's truly baffling.
For a direct example of both of these game styles in a single game try the first Styx game. You can play deadly or you can truly ghost it; highest difficulty, no magical abilities, not even any knockouts. Just careful movement and distractions to create windows. You can go the whole game without ever attacking anything except for the final boss fight right at the end.
Or you can use all your abilities, race through the level and kill everything, even on the harder difficulties that make you auto-lose melee combat you can still kill the absolute frick out of everything, and it just isn't as good a game. There's no tension, you always have the upper hand, you're never disadvantaged because being able to make clones and use other weird abilities like invisibility and shit just totally destroys any and all "stealth" from the game.
Most modern stealth titles just ignore the actual stealth, "Oh the main character has a scarf over their face? Must be a stealth game" that's about as deep as it gets. People calling shit like the new Thief title or Dishonoured STEALTH GAMES when they play more like basic fricking shooters is absurd to me.
DON'T FORGET TO PRESS X FOR THAT EEEPPPIIICCC STEALTH KILL BRO! QUICK USE THE BODY MELTING POTION TO MAKE IT CLEAN! WOW! NICE! MULTIKILL COMBO!
In my eyes, the main issue with stealth games isn't that they only make sense when you play them with a sense of self-imposed rules to ignore all the overpowered tools/exploits/mechanics, but rather that they all tend towards perfectionism instead of improvisation (which is IMO when stealth games are at their most tense, like in multiplayer stealth games). Namely:
1) Stealth games tend to extremely punish you for making extremely small mistakes in the form of permanent level-wide raised awareness for all NPCs, forcing you to wait a significant time for NPCs to go back to their original state, or simply (almost) killing you outright. Here the true health bar isn't your actual health bar, but it's how long it takes for you to get spotted (and have the alarms be raised)
2) Stealth games tend to give you the ability to freely quicksave/load, thus letting you freely bruteforce a solution where you don't suffer long-term consequences
3) Stealth games aren't very action-intensive; by design a lot of patience and waiting, but having to repeat that after a game over gets on people's nerves, which they would rather avoid. Although waiting is necessary for the atmosphere, even horror games lose their sense of atmosphere if you are forced to retry a certain portion several times
And most importantly:
4) Stealth games have a razor-thin margin of error while at the same time having very long levels, often with no clear checkpoints. It's like trying to play Super Meat Boy but each level is 20+ minutes long and has several parts where you are simply waiting for a platform to appear in the right position.
Even if you'd take away savescumming in favor of checkpoints, you'd run the risk of making players feel more frustrated due to all the other aforementioned factors, now that they do not have the means to skip the waiting/runbacks (like in Souls games). Stealth game conventions would need to be radically rethought to address these issues.
Stealth games shouldn't let you permanently disable guards to begin with. Why would you make a game around manipulating enemy AI, and then give you the option to remove the AI outright? You should only be able to temporarily disable them, and even then your means of doing so should be limited either by making it very hard to do or tying it to a scarce resource.
Snipe Elite is actually decent stealth game
but instead hiding in shadow like ninja undetected its more like
OH SHIT THERE IS SNIPER EVERYONE GET DOWN AND FIND HI
kind of stealth
So you mean it's more like the shit killing stealth games?
stop pushing ghosting as being the peak way to play
>no interacting with enemies or assets at all
that shit is so boring
it's like playing a walking sim
I liked all the whacky shit you could do in MGS3 like destroy the enemy's supplies, throw animals at them, all the stupid shit you could do with their bodies like interrogating them, holding them up and shaking them down, dragging their bodies around and throwing them into hazards like electric fences, or feeding them to crocs
if you make a game where all you can do is just avoid enemies or maybe execute takedowns it gets old fricking fast