why do modern online shooters NOT cater for stealth?

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Atmos Duality

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Farcry did a pretty good job of employing foliage as cover....until they invented the Psychic Vision Binoculars that rendered it useless.
 

Midnight Crossroads

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Stealth is fine in multiplayer, especially CoD. What do you want, a cloaking device? The only thing that could be said to be wrong is that there aren't enough maps large enough and with enough foliage to exploit it. I've gone entire matches on undergrowth prone in the tall grass outside a choke point with a silenced sniper rifle and cold blooded, and decimated enemy teams trying to run past.

Stealth should be difficult, but rewarding. The military doesn't train large groups of soldiers to go behind enemy lines with suppressed weapons to wreak havoc because it's an extremely difficult ability to do well beyond laying in the grass beside a road and waiting with a SAW.
 

The Heik

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shootthebandit said:
i know your gonna throw some games at me such as MW2 (you can use cold blood and ninja) yeah thats useful but theres nowhere to hide and be stealthy, overgrown and wastleland have a bit more grass to be stealthy and you can have some sucess also the prone block can be really annoying because all of the good spots for crawling keep getting that pop up thing, not to mention that the ghuilly suit is only availible and even with the ghuilly suit the rendering of your body stands out from the background

you could also mention BFBC2 which can be played with an element of stealth, it still lacks prone and the spot button is rediculous

i bet your just about to mention hardcore modes, i dont like hardcore because its generally a stalemate between 2 opposing teams of snipers and as stalement suggests it gets stale and boring

i dont see why its difficult for devs to allow places for people to be stealthy (not neccesarily hiding spots just long grass etc), dont block prone and camo which blends to the environment

please be aware the difference between being stealthy and camping or hiding, you may have to hide temporarily but the general purpose is to get behind the enemy and go by the policy of 'if they cant see me they cant shoot me', afterall the element of surprise is more effective than any weapon or gadget
the main reason why stealth isn't used in most online games is because it's so hard to work into it. If you make good stealth for online, then everyone is going to use it because it means that one isn't at risk, which often does lead to stalemates such as with the sniper example you gave, or even worse, two teams trying to flank each other in a great big endless circle.

There is also the issue that most online games are very dynamic, while stealth is only really useful against static defenses or in defending a territory. Unstealthed enemies will move faster than you, and unless they're running straight at you then it doesn't really matter if you're moving silently because either you'll lose sight of him or have to become unstealthy in order to catch up.

The only way stealth will probably be used would be either as the pick-up version from Halo, where you get a short stealth capability from running over the orb, which takes a while to respawn, or the traditionall approach where you blend in if you're not moving much and/or wearing the right apparel, which is generally how stealth works realistically anyway.

Aside: Just so you know, in terms of flanking and surprise, speed would be more useful than stealth. Flankers are more hit and run types, and have to move fast in order to keep targeting the weak spots in the enemy formation.
 

Talon Julius

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Well Halo:Reach has the cloak ability. It was pretty damn fun during the beta. Go to a forward position, cloak, crouch past enemies, then uncloak and shank.
 

kaiser_what

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I'm pretty sure that everyone also said it, but I'm going to say it anyway. Do you really like stealth sections in a non-stealth game? I know there are ones that are well-done, but most of the time they just comes off as padding and poorly made. Even if the game allows you to use stealth, usually the direct confrontation method is the most effective.

Beside, don't sniping is considered a form of stealth in online shooters?

Edit: Another thing, people usually abuse stealth in online shooters anyway, so why should they cater for stealth?
 

ArcWinter

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I do stealth in every game most of the time. It works, but there are still some times where I have to just flip out because i got surprised.

But I don't really know why. Probably because it would be easily abused/overpowered. I mean, you can't shoot what you can't see.


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH
 

ProfessorLayton

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Because that's not what online gaming is made for... an online stealth game would be fantastic, but I can't imagine many people playing it. And since your avatar is Gray Fox I can see that you like stealth, but sorry... I don't see many online stealth games. The closest we'll probably get is Counter-Strike: Source with the walk button and all.
 

Dr_Steve_Brule

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Because stealth usually sucks even in regular FPS multiplayers.
Do you know that annoying feeling, the one that you get when someone sneaks around you and shoots you in the back, sometimes even several times in a row?
Imagine that happening EVERY TIME YOU DIE.
People will just ragequit en mass.
 

Treeinthewoods

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In my experience, stealth in games as you describe it really only happens in campaign modes and not online. Like in the first Modern Warfare during the sniper mission when the guys literally walk around you without seeing you. The problem is that if all those guys were people instead of AI they would have killed you in a few seconds because camo just doesn't work that way in multiplayer. If camo literally turned you invisible you would have an extremely unfair advantage over the "run and gunner" or the "camp and sniper."
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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TOTL_UNIALAYSHUN said:
I'm not aware of any game with online stealth.
Metal Gear Online has 2 stealth online modes.

The first one is called Team Sneaking, which is my favorite online mode ever. In the mode, one team is invisible with tranq pistols and knives and the other team has normal guns. The invisible team's goal is to sneak to the targets the gun team is defending and return them to a goal. The gun team can spot an invisible by seeing his tranq gun or knife, the dust they kick up, the sound of their footsteps, and a couple other things. Also, once someone on the gun team spots an invisible, everyone on the invisible team loses their invisible stealth for 5 seconds.

The second mode is called Stealth Deathmatch, which is basically a deathmatch where everyone is invisible. Also, there is a circle closing in on the map that you most stay in and it's purpose is to get people to get closer together.
 

sleeperhit79

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I'll be blunt and say what many people are afraid to say in fear of being branded a COD-loving douchebag. Stealth online multiplayer shooters against other human opponents would be boring as hell. just like having realistic AI in single player games isn't fun stealth with human AI also not fun. Imagine any stealth game MGS or splinter cell where the AI isn't functually retarted when it comes to stealth and you'll see a "you died" screen a lot and it wouldn't be fun. I guess it's just a matter of some things don't work as well in a video game which is why I don't want a hardcore realistic shooter like ARMA, and i don't want stealth multiplayer where it takes me 4 minutes to kill a guy. just not fun for the average gamer.
 

DNA

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shootthebandit said:
i know your gonna throw some games at me such as MW2 (you can use cold blood and ninja) yeah thats useful but theres nowhere to hide and be stealthy, overgrown and wastleland have a bit more grass to be stealthy and you can have some sucess also the prone block can be really annoying because all of the good spots for crawling keep getting that pop up thing, not to mention that the ghuilly suit is only availible and even with the ghuilly suit the rendering of your body stands out from the background

you could also mention BFBC2 which can be played with an element of stealth, it still lacks prone and the spot button is rediculous

i bet your just about to mention hardcore modes, i dont like hardcore because its generally a stalemate between 2 opposing teams of snipers and as stalement suggests it gets stale and boring

i dont see why its difficult for devs to allow places for people to be stealthy (not neccesarily hiding spots just long grass etc), dont block prone and camo which blends to the environment

please be aware the difference between being stealthy and camping or hiding, you may have to hide temporarily but the general purpose is to get behind the enemy and go by the policy of 'if they cant see me they cant shoot me', afterall the element of surprise is more effective than any weapon or gadget
Addressing specifically the "tall grass and camo" aspect. That is a rendering limitation that may or may not be on the brink of capability. Camouflage is an illusion to begin with. And from a technical standpoint, unless it makes you "part" of the scenery or inherently makes your pixels disappear a dynamic graphic moving across a static will never be able to offer the illusion that you see in real life.

It would require the effect of rending the idea of bending light around an object in a dynamic means that also dynamically effects the back drop and then upon a dynamic camera angle capable of keeping that light bending capability from a radial 360 degree aspect.

Think about those "magic eye" pictures. You cross your eyes to pull out the real image and then you focus it. The act of crossing your eyes causes you to see the light reflection in a different way, allowing you to pull the real image out. If you attempt to then do it from a different angle, you lose the picture because the light reflecting is different.
 

Tdc2182

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Because its classified as camping/being a douche. If you are gonna have stealth elements in an online shooter you need to make that part of the core game, which many devs do, such as Assassins creed, Splinter Cell, etc.
 

Tharwen

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A real-time online shooter has no real place for stealth, since the games simply aren't long enough. A single stealth infiltration of the enemy lines will take about three times as long as a normal attack (I'm not including invisibility modes) and since you're likely to fail once or twice, you'll spend most of the game on one attack.
 

Chappy

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Being Stealthy in a game seems to upset a lot of people, also with a game like Modern Warfare you need to take into the account a lot of people are cheating (boosting) or camping which makes stealth really not an viable option if you want to win.

It is a lot easier for people to sit in a corner and shoot people passing by than to actually try to be stealthy and find people to kill, and since a lot of people are sensitive over their Kill/Death ratio's these days they are going to sadly go for the options that get them the best results for the least effort and risk hence the campers, noob tubers and boosters but they hate it when their killing spree's are ruined by someone stealthy.

I'd also note that I would suggest that the 'pop up hit marker' is to cater more for the bullet penetration through terrain gimic that the games were throwing around at the time.

As for the Sniper only ghuilly suit I believe you may be able to customise your appearance in Black Op's but I am not sure so that may be your saving grace there with their money system thing I heard about.

If you are looking at Modern Warfare in particular though the probably one glaring reason people don't generally try to be stealth is Kill streaks, Kill streaks are easier to get from camping after all (look at most people going for nukes) though Rundown seems a nice map for sneaking around as I found it if you keep an eye out.

Sorry for the long post, feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong :p
 

Sniper Team 4

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I am going to do exactly what you said not to and bring up Modern Warfare 2. As you mentioned, I do you cold blooded and ninja. I have had rounds where I wipe out the entire enemy team as they run around trying to figure out where I am. One of my favorite memories is running from a guy, ducking down in the grass, then as he ran past I jumped up and knifed him. Oh, the words he must have been saying. There are plenty of ways to be stealthy in MW2, one just needs to look for them.

Sadly, that's all I have, as MW2 is the only online multiplayer game I play.