Being able to walk in front of an enemy and them having no awareness that I'm really there to kill them. Would you expect me to say anything other than Hitman: Blood Money? Assassin's Creed did it pretty well too.
What do you like in a Stealth Game, and which one does it best?
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Hitman: Blood Money and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I am in love with these two games and they embody everything stealth should be, in my opinion.
Thief 1(i really need to play T2), although System Shock 2 comes in at a close 2nd as it really isnt a stealth game its more like a slightly scarier (and much better) version of Bioshock. But the fact it uses the modified Thief game engine mean all the stealth mechanics were still intact. But instead of hiding from human guards It was zombies which could get unnerving at times. The fact I could run away from them, hide and then ambush them was great fun 
Bioshock was could really do with the same stealth mechanic. But sadly if they did all ppl would just use it to loot items like in Bethesda's games
Bioshock was could really do with the same stealth mechanic. But sadly if they did all ppl would just use it to loot items like in Bethesda's games
Thief, thief, thief, thief, Thief! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_(series)]
Firstly, paralleling an observation made by Yahtzee (in his reviews of Splinter Cell and Velvet Assassin) most of the levels are non-linear, so you can choose your approach, either to clear one perimeter at a time, or to sneak directly to your objectives and worry about looting later. Many of the levels also provide secret passages and transit ways between zones that are often unknown to the guards, and provide for hasty escapes. Some levels in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory provide a range of different approaches, at least within a zone, with no right or wrong way to go about it, especially when figuring out how to get close enough to a hostile to make a clean neutralization[footnote]Dropping down on a target from above, or defenestrating [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration] someone from outside the window are two personal faves.[/footnote]
Secondly, I dug the code-against-killing that Garret takes on when playing Expert difficulty, which positions thieves and spies (or saboteurs) in a higher order than warriors and assassins.[footnote]Interestingly, this has marked how I play the Splinter Cell series, in that I tend to get zero kills and lots of knockouts, mostly from Uncle No One Lives Forever: A Spy In HARM's Way [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Fisher_(Splinter_Cell)] in which a knocked-out foe would waken on his own and eventually arm himself, even if all weapons were confiscated. So the best way to dispatch foes was to tranq them from afar and then shoot them in the head with a silenced handgun. Excellent spy grit, but dissonant with the light-hearted themes of the franchise. In Splinter Cell, unconscious bodies can be wakened if discovered by allies, which some players took as incentive to just kill them in the first place. Unconscious foes in Thief stayed that way. So, a note to game devs: knock-outs, like flashlight batteries, should last the duration of a level.[/footnote]
One of the problems that I've seen in Thief, but also in other games, including the Splinter Cell franchise is the level of blue sense [http://www.skepdic.com/bluesens.html] that searching enemies show. They seem conspicuously drawn in your direction, no matter how hidden you are, and in the case of Splinter Cell no matter if you've tossed a sound distraction somewhere else in the room[footnote]The noisemaker arrow in Thief seems to just as magically distract guards, so despite their prior intuitions, the noisemaker is far more attractive a target[/footnote]. I've also noticed that in a lot of cases, if one person detects you enough to shoot at you, everyone else in the area immediately knows exactly where you are (enough to shoot you a lot), no matter how dark it is. Sadly Thief: Deadly Shadows took things in the opposite direction, making opponents really easy to confuse, and having the wall-hug maneuver make Garret completely undetectable to everything else.[footnote]Ergo, a common solution to a disturbance would be to wall-hug and then go make a sandwich. By the time you got back, everyone would be back to their patrols.[/footnote] It seems to be an ongoing challenge to make enemy AI believably smart and believably stupid.
As a last note, Level 3 of Thief: The Dark Project, titled Down in the Bonehoard is in my opinion, the best dungeon romp ever! One could (and someone should) devote an entire game to sneaking into tombs of the rich and powerful guarded by traps and ill-perceptive (or plain stupid) monsters that completely outmatch the looter in a stand-up fight, to relieve the dead of treasures they are obviously no longer using. The story writes itself: Tomb Robber makes a meager living on commissions to reappropriate family heirlooms and legacy weapons. Said delver earns a fixed fee plus tips, that is, any treasures found not specified by the client. Sooner or later, our catacomb crusader will piss off some god or undead king or whatever by stealing the wrong thing or unintentionally desecrating some holy spot, and the game is afoot.
238U
Firstly, paralleling an observation made by Yahtzee (in his reviews of Splinter Cell and Velvet Assassin) most of the levels are non-linear, so you can choose your approach, either to clear one perimeter at a time, or to sneak directly to your objectives and worry about looting later. Many of the levels also provide secret passages and transit ways between zones that are often unknown to the guards, and provide for hasty escapes. Some levels in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory provide a range of different approaches, at least within a zone, with no right or wrong way to go about it, especially when figuring out how to get close enough to a hostile to make a clean neutralization[footnote]Dropping down on a target from above, or defenestrating [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration] someone from outside the window are two personal faves.[/footnote]
Secondly, I dug the code-against-killing that Garret takes on when playing Expert difficulty, which positions thieves and spies (or saboteurs) in a higher order than warriors and assassins.[footnote]Interestingly, this has marked how I play the Splinter Cell series, in that I tend to get zero kills and lots of knockouts, mostly from Uncle No One Lives Forever: A Spy In HARM's Way [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Fisher_(Splinter_Cell)] in which a knocked-out foe would waken on his own and eventually arm himself, even if all weapons were confiscated. So the best way to dispatch foes was to tranq them from afar and then shoot them in the head with a silenced handgun. Excellent spy grit, but dissonant with the light-hearted themes of the franchise. In Splinter Cell, unconscious bodies can be wakened if discovered by allies, which some players took as incentive to just kill them in the first place. Unconscious foes in Thief stayed that way. So, a note to game devs: knock-outs, like flashlight batteries, should last the duration of a level.[/footnote]
One of the problems that I've seen in Thief, but also in other games, including the Splinter Cell franchise is the level of blue sense [http://www.skepdic.com/bluesens.html] that searching enemies show. They seem conspicuously drawn in your direction, no matter how hidden you are, and in the case of Splinter Cell no matter if you've tossed a sound distraction somewhere else in the room[footnote]The noisemaker arrow in Thief seems to just as magically distract guards, so despite their prior intuitions, the noisemaker is far more attractive a target[/footnote]. I've also noticed that in a lot of cases, if one person detects you enough to shoot at you, everyone else in the area immediately knows exactly where you are (enough to shoot you a lot), no matter how dark it is. Sadly Thief: Deadly Shadows took things in the opposite direction, making opponents really easy to confuse, and having the wall-hug maneuver make Garret completely undetectable to everything else.[footnote]Ergo, a common solution to a disturbance would be to wall-hug and then go make a sandwich. By the time you got back, everyone would be back to their patrols.[/footnote] It seems to be an ongoing challenge to make enemy AI believably smart and believably stupid.
As a last note, Level 3 of Thief: The Dark Project, titled Down in the Bonehoard is in my opinion, the best dungeon romp ever! One could (and someone should) devote an entire game to sneaking into tombs of the rich and powerful guarded by traps and ill-perceptive (or plain stupid) monsters that completely outmatch the looter in a stand-up fight, to relieve the dead of treasures they are obviously no longer using. The story writes itself: Tomb Robber makes a meager living on commissions to reappropriate family heirlooms and legacy weapons. Said delver earns a fixed fee plus tips, that is, any treasures found not specified by the client. Sooner or later, our catacomb crusader will piss off some god or undead king or whatever by stealing the wrong thing or unintentionally desecrating some holy spot, and the game is afoot.
238U
i would have to say a mix of thief 2 and trilby would be pretty awesome, i think hacking and lock picking should have different mini games and not killing is always awesome and challenging.
Thief: The
Thief 2: The Metal Age is significantly harder than The Dark Project, largely because the Mechanists like to build their compounds with clanky metal floors, and in fact don't like wood. The last level is notoriously save-spam material.
Oh, and the servants are scarier than the haunts and zombies...and they're of no danger to you until the end.
I also strongly endorse Thief-o-vision as appears in Deadly Shadows and Velvet Assassin, in which objects of value sparkle in the darkness. Ka-ching!
238U
Myself, I need to play System Shock 2. I never completed it before I upgraded and moved on.TrevHead said:
Thief 2: The Metal Age is significantly harder than The Dark Project, largely because the Mechanists like to build their compounds with clanky metal floors, and in fact don't like wood. The last level is notoriously save-spam material.
Oh, and the servants are scarier than the haunts and zombies...and they're of no danger to you until the end.
Looting is not a bad thing. In fact, I found the whole treasure for its own sake thing really does work, such as the gold bars in Return to Castle Wolvenstein in which the gold bars did nothing play a cool chime but add to a tally at the end of each level: X out of Y gold bars found. Campaign total: Z+X gold bars. In Thief, the loot money was spent financing your loadout for your next level, but even that was unnecessary. All that was necessary was a minimum loot to get a mission success (on top of specified target pieces attained) and a total loot in the level, for those seeking 100% completion. If the devs want to be generous, they can give different levels of completion for threshold loot totals.
I also strongly endorse Thief-o-vision as appears in Deadly Shadows and Velvet Assassin, in which objects of value sparkle in the darkness. Ka-ching!
238U
Most of the games I would say have already been said.
But I will mention one I do like.
Metro 2033, it had quite a few levels were you could sneak through instead of shooting through. Even going to the extent that you could go through some without killing.
Only problem I had with it was if you got caught you couldn't go back into a stealth-y mode.
Unless I was doing something wrong.
But I will mention one I do like.
Metro 2033, it had quite a few levels were you could sneak through instead of shooting through. Even going to the extent that you could go through some without killing.
Only problem I had with it was if you got caught you couldn't go back into a stealth-y mode.
Unless I was doing something wrong.
Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines played great as a stealth game; heck, if you chose to play as a Nosferatu, you pretty much had to play it as a stealth game.
I really like it when games allow for a variety of different play styles and solutions. V:TMB was a cracker in that regard.
I really like it when games allow for a variety of different play styles and solutions. V:TMB was a cracker in that regard.
I've loved stealth games ever since I was a kid, I think the first stealth game I played was Tenchu, and now I fucking love Tenchu. Me and a friend spent months on Wrath of Heaven trying to get through all the co-op levels undetected. I'm not sure if it was hard or we were just awful at it but we would literally fail 50 times in a row and still enjoy playing.
I like being required to figure out the ways throughout a level, paying attention to enemy movements and so on to sneak past undetected, even if that means waiting in a bathroom for 30 minutes because I accidentally got into a tight space I can't get out of or I can't figure out where the fuck I'm going.
I like being required to figure out the ways throughout a level, paying attention to enemy movements and so on to sneak past undetected, even if that means waiting in a bathroom for 30 minutes because I accidentally got into a tight space I can't get out of or I can't figure out where the fuck I'm going.
I really liked Splinter Cell, MGS, Riddick, Deus Ex and a few others I can't remember right now.
I like the feeling of accomplishment I get after sneaking past enemies. Not just any enemies though. For example,if I sneak past a goblin or something, then big whoop, but if I sneak past a guard who I know would be very tough to defeat, then it feels very good.
In short words, I like to sneak past fights
In short words, I like to sneak past fights
Maybe it's my nostalgia but the PS2 entries Fatal Shadows/Wrath of Heaven are superior games. Z just doesnt' do it for me.Akytalusia said:
Thief 2 is the only game which has ever gotten it largely right. There are several reasons for this, and while most of them were covered in the ZP review, I may as well repeat them.
1) Visibility meter. Not the Oblivion light up eye which seems to flicker on and off completely arbitrary, but a meter which tells you accurately how much light is falling on you at the time and how visible this makes you. True, it wasn't exactly realistic at times and was incredibly forgiving, but I guess that's why Garrett is a master thief.
The visibility meter lets you plan a strategy, but more importantly to react when it goes wrong. The game becomes about timing and tense moments moving from shadow to shadow.
And while Yahtzee might have got a good laugh out of Garrett's tap shoes, the fact is that they did the same thing for audiable noise, meaning you could actually tell how loud you were being, and not have to pray to some hidden dice roll inside the computer.
2) Large levels with multiple possible paths of unequal difficulty. While this did mean frustratingly long loading times back in the days when computers weren't so hot, it also elevated the game above simply being a puzzle game, which too many stealth games now are. There was a clear motive for scouting and exploring, and other than depleting your supply of special arrows there was no penalty for doing so.
3) Good storytelling. I've found that most Stealth games cast you as the kind of generic military/pseudomilitary/fantasy hero archetypes who populate action games in vast numbers, only you're just being a bit stealthy. Garrett was actually written as a stealth character, not a generic hero who just happened to like sneaking. His motives (disregard humans, acquire currency) was the key point of gameplay.
The only real problem with it is the ease of just blackjacking everyone as opposed to sneaking past them. Even then though, you didn't have to use the blackjack and there was that one glorious mission where they restricted it and you had to spend hours sneaking past each individual guard. Classic stuff.
1) Visibility meter. Not the Oblivion light up eye which seems to flicker on and off completely arbitrary, but a meter which tells you accurately how much light is falling on you at the time and how visible this makes you. True, it wasn't exactly realistic at times and was incredibly forgiving, but I guess that's why Garrett is a master thief.
The visibility meter lets you plan a strategy, but more importantly to react when it goes wrong. The game becomes about timing and tense moments moving from shadow to shadow.
And while Yahtzee might have got a good laugh out of Garrett's tap shoes, the fact is that they did the same thing for audiable noise, meaning you could actually tell how loud you were being, and not have to pray to some hidden dice roll inside the computer.
2) Large levels with multiple possible paths of unequal difficulty. While this did mean frustratingly long loading times back in the days when computers weren't so hot, it also elevated the game above simply being a puzzle game, which too many stealth games now are. There was a clear motive for scouting and exploring, and other than depleting your supply of special arrows there was no penalty for doing so.
3) Good storytelling. I've found that most Stealth games cast you as the kind of generic military/pseudomilitary/fantasy hero archetypes who populate action games in vast numbers, only you're just being a bit stealthy. Garrett was actually written as a stealth character, not a generic hero who just happened to like sneaking. His motives (disregard humans, acquire currency) was the key point of gameplay.
The only real problem with it is the ease of just blackjacking everyone as opposed to sneaking past them. Even then though, you didn't have to use the blackjack and there was that one glorious mission where they restricted it and you had to spend hours sneaking past each individual guard. Classic stuff.
In contrast, I suppose, I take the more aggressive sniper route.
I love the ability to take down everyone (except one, if I feel sadistic) in an 'enemy base' without anyone noticing. Moving to a place silently, and suddenly no ones left alive.
I would do this in Oblivion, Fallout, Assassins Creed and even sometimes in thief, whether I needed to kill everyone or not.
And I also, don't know why, want to say that I liked stealth in Far Cry 2 (which reminds me Far Cry one had EPIC stealth) because I just somehow remember it had an addictive stealth atmosphere of sniping in the long grass, even though the AI had that annoying programming to know where you were after two shots.
And this might be totally unstealth-gamely, but in CoD:MW2 I found the (linear) stealth spec-ops levels amazingly addictive when I played it with my friend, because we were counting down to shots and everything (didn't yahtzee say something similar?).
So, to be a little more contributory, I think that stealth games should have a separate co-op element. Of course you would need head sets and so wouldn't be exactly realistic unless the AI could hear you talking. But I think that would be Awesome.
I love the ability to take down everyone (except one, if I feel sadistic) in an 'enemy base' without anyone noticing. Moving to a place silently, and suddenly no ones left alive.
I would do this in Oblivion, Fallout, Assassins Creed and even sometimes in thief, whether I needed to kill everyone or not.
And I also, don't know why, want to say that I liked stealth in Far Cry 2 (which reminds me Far Cry one had EPIC stealth) because I just somehow remember it had an addictive stealth atmosphere of sniping in the long grass, even though the AI had that annoying programming to know where you were after two shots.
And this might be totally unstealth-gamely, but in CoD:MW2 I found the (linear) stealth spec-ops levels amazingly addictive when I played it with my friend, because we were counting down to shots and everything (didn't yahtzee say something similar?).
So, to be a little more contributory, I think that stealth games should have a separate co-op element. Of course you would need head sets and so wouldn't be exactly realistic unless the AI could hear you talking. But I think that would be Awesome.
I think what I love about stealth games is a combination of strategic thinking and tension building. I usually prefer a combat\stealth dynamic as opposed to pure stealth, like choosing between combat and stealth e.g. Deus Ex\Hitman or alternating between combat and stealth sections e.g. Arkham Asylum\Metal Gear Solid.
The theif series is the only series Ive played and really did it right to me. There are very few moments in games where Ive sat there holding my breath as a guard looks into the darkness, coming so close that I can see their searching eyes and wonder if he will or wont spot me while simultenously praying they wont. Thief does that and it does it better then any other stealth game Ive played.
I also prefer a stealth based game to not require killing or even touching enemies. Splinter cell Conviction made us kill everyone from stealth and really I didnt like it at all. I mean if I have to kill everyone why not just march in there with a minigun and save me some time? Of all the stealth action games maybe Metal gear solid 2 had the best mix of consequences for not staying stealthy. You had to dispose of bodies you killed and things could get bad for you quick if you were quick about it or didnt take care of some kind of evidence. If you must have a game that allows but doesnt require you to do away with opponents then make it so there are consequences for taking the kill/attack route
I also prefer a stealth based game to not require killing or even touching enemies. Splinter cell Conviction made us kill everyone from stealth and really I didnt like it at all. I mean if I have to kill everyone why not just march in there with a minigun and save me some time? Of all the stealth action games maybe Metal gear solid 2 had the best mix of consequences for not staying stealthy. You had to dispose of bodies you killed and things could get bad for you quick if you were quick about it or didnt take care of some kind of evidence. If you must have a game that allows but doesnt require you to do away with opponents then make it so there are consequences for taking the kill/attack route