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DalekFlay This one's for you: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-23-stealth-vs-stealth
Excerpt:
Stealth vs stealth
Jordan Amaro is a designer at Kojima Productions working on Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Mike Bithell is a designer working at home on Volume. Both are making stealth games, but both are taking radically different approaches.
Excerpt:
Eurogamer: Stealth now is very different to stealth as it was when the first Metal Gear game released. It now seems more action focused. Why has it evolved this way?
Jordan Amaro: Money!
Mike Bithell: I think it is an attempt to broaden a niche past the initial audience. I don't remember stealth gamers wanting the choices. I don't remember stealth gamers saying, 'Oh, I really wish Garrett could kill people with a machine gun crossbow.' I don't remember that being a conversation stealth gamers had.
Metal Gear Solid's Snake can kill with his three-hit combo, and Garrett has his tools for that, and Sam Fisher definitely has guns for that. It's always been there, but I think the balance has declined. I preferred the old way, which was, violence is an escape. Violence is you messing up and dealing with the consequences.
While Metal Gear has kept to that pretty well, with the exception of some parts of 4, it felt like if I was killing people it was because I messed up. That to me is the balance I like.
If that's how you're approaching it, I'm fine with that. Where I have problems is where violence versus stealth is presented as a pure choice. You see this a lot in the marketing campaigns - more so often than in the games themselves. If you look at the way Splinter Cell Blacklist was marketed, the ads on the Tube were like, 'play it your way'. That's where it goes too far for me. At that point that looks a lot like you're trying to get Gears of War players to play your stealth game, and at that point I lose interest because that's not for me any more.
Jordan Amaro: One answer is, it's a legitimate way for any business to broaden their audience to get more money to make more games. Another answer would be, by allowing you to use all this violence in stealth games, we're only expressing what the characters can do in the games. Why would Sam Fisher have to flee all of the time? Why would Garrett have to flee? Have they not been trained or prepared themselves?
It's legitimate. My character is an agent. He has weapons, so why not throw grenades and use RPGs?
Eurogamer: Then why bother with stealth in the first place?
Jordan Amaro: Because it's the essence of an already pre-existing IP.
Mike Bithell: With Metal Gear Solid 4, using the gun wasn't the smoothest option. That's the balancing act for me. Guns should feel like the get out of jail card that puts you in danger. That's where with Splinter Cell I lost track, because the new Splinter Cell, you can literally play it as a third-person shooter and you can get through it a lot quicker. Players do, even if they're not conscious of it, choose the path of least resistance through a game.
I think it is possible to have a gun in a stealth game and not ruin it as a stealth game. It's not the stealth game I chose to make. I chose to go the complete opposite way, but that's something I can do because my game is about a street urchin. My game is about a kid who doesn't understand guns. It doesn't occur to his psyche to use a gun. He's never killed. He doesn't want to.
Eurogamer: Jade Raymond told me they were trying to make Splinter Cell more accessible because stealth is too hard for a lot of people. But the word accessibility is such a dirty word among stealth fans.
Mike Bithell: If you're making a game that costs tens of millions, you have to justify that budget. I get it. My argument is stealth was a niche and if people treat it as a niche and admit not everyone is going to play this game, you're not going to turn a stealth game into a Call of Duty.
Volume will not sell many copies. Volume will probably be outsold by Thomas Was Alone, but it's been made in such a way that that's fine. Volume is less approachable than a pretentious indie platformer. I'm just as cynical as Ubisoft, really. I'm trying to capitalise on a niche. I'm saying, I know there are probably a million people in the world who want a stealth stealth game and they want an editor. So the ability to edit levels is as much motivated by, oh, this would be awesome, as, this will get people playing my game and talking about my game and they'll sell it.
Eurogamer: You say stealth was a niche, but I remember Metal Gear Solid being the biggest game in the world at one point.
Mike Bithell: It wasn't because of the stealth. It was like a movie. It was cinematic. It was all these words that used to get bounced around about Metal Gear Solid back before everyone started saying those were the bad things about it.
I think a lot of people who liked Metal Gear liked it despite the stealth. I remember being massively frustrated by the stealth and the reason I got through the stealth bits was because I wanted to see the next cut-scene. Yeah, it was massive, but my point is it was massive as part of a much more niche hobby at the time it came out. It was a big game in a smaller niche.
Jordan Amaro: Accessibility... I don't know what to say about that. It's very sensitive. Help me, what do we mean by accessibility? Do we mean good design? Do we mean changing the values of the game, the core of the game?
Mike Bithell: The end result is more people feel comfortable playing the game.
Jordan Amaro: So that would be good design, right?
Mike Bithell: It would be design that caters to a larger audience. Is that right?
Eurogamer: For many it means dumbing down. It means what they know and love is lessened.
Jordan Amaro: What if I tell you in MGS5, if you don't change the options you have markers and all the stuff you'd expect from a western game, but when you go into the options and you start turning off things, then it becomes more hardcore and more difficult? Would that be a good example of an accessible game that by default is accessible, but if you're an experienced hardcore gamer then you can cater the experience to your liking?
Mike Bithell: There is still the issue of the default game - the definitive Metal Gear Solid 5 experience.
Jordan Amaro: I don't know about you, but when I start a game I go directly into the options to see what's there and tweak the options.
Eurogamer: Doesn't all this impact the design from the ground up?
Jordan Amaro: We've spoken about this at the studio. We made the missions both for people who have time and don't have time, who care and don't care. I spoke about this to Patrick Plourde, the creative director on Far Cry 3, and he said, I also make games for the guy who comes home after a hard day's work, he's tired, he boots up the console, he plays the game and he wants to get it immediately.
Are we going to neglect those people? Are we going to not care about them? I don't think we should. I think the right answer is by default propose them something that is accessible and the hardcore players will explore the options to find their own game.
I'm not giving you some PR BS. In Metal Gear Solid you can customise markers and difficulty. When I turned off everything it was difficult for me as a designer to play the game because if I wasn't careful enough, or if I was sprinting I would be spotted from the tower, and then boom.
So you still have that, but yes you will have to customise the experience.
Mike Bithell: Whatever the default is, that's the version of your game I'll play, because honestly I make the assumption when I start a game that the default is the definitive experience. And that's the experience 99 per cent of your players will have.
I do think there is a very troubling trend in gamer culture that we care too much about what the person sat next to us is experiencing, like how is that affecting my game? Especially in a single-player, focused experience, it's none of my business how someone else plays the game. As a consumer I don't care. If you make it so your game can be turned into the hardest game ever, and I'm playing that version and the guy over there is playing that other version, great, we're both being entertained in exactly the way we want.
The issue gamer culture has right now is in some way the guy having the easier experience devalues the experience of the other person. You see this in all of the discussions - this idea that, if so and so has that thing they want then that affects me. You see if in the debate around sexism and race in games. If that person over there can do the thing I think is wrong, if this game is available that doesn't specifically cater to my tastes, then it affects me. There's an entitlement to that discussion that bothers me. It bothers me that there will be people who complain that, well I shouldn't have to go to the options, it should be by default, it should be the game I want. And I'm kind of with you guys. I think that's fair enough.
I will say, though, I do feel like the default game experience in Metal Gear Solid will be whatever you guys set it to be at the start. There we differ.
Jordan Amano: When I boot Splinter Cell and Deus Ex and Thief 4, I go immediately into the options and then to realistic mode. I don't understand what the fuss is about. I know if I just press A and hey! I'm not going to get the game I'm expecting, so I naturally go into the options to tweak the game.
Eurogamer: To counter that, with the last Splinter Cell, even if you put it on its hardest difficulty and turn off things like Mark and Execute, the game still feels different than stealth fans had hoped.
Mike Bithell: It's designed for those things to exist.
Eurogamer: So my question is...
Jordan Amaro: Don't design the game in such a way that it imposes situations or strongly makes you feel like you should be forced to shoot or change your approach or your play style?
Eurogamer: Exactly.
Jordan Amaro: That's the importance of level design, as we talked about. It's the project vision. In an open world we're not bothered by this.
Mike Bithell: Your design approach is less structured than mine. In Volume - let's imagine an alternate reality where lockers you can hide in are considered the height of lame-stream game design and there's an option in the options menu to switch off lockers, you can't play Volume any more because my game is really designed. You can't turn off or on anything. I might not even do a difficulty setting. I probably will! But it will always be a case of, I'm going to make the version of the game I want you to play, and then I'll probably make a slightly easier version if you want it as well.
I'm hemmed in in a way you're not. If you're achieving this objective of, we have an idea for a path, but ultimately we're creating a systems-based game - which is how it sounds - my game is designed. That's a limitation I have to impose upon myself as a designer.
Eurogamer: So what you're saying is because Metal Gear Solid 5 is open-world, you avoid the issues the last Splinter Cell suffered from?
Jordan Amaro: It's systemic. We get rid of all the narrative burdens, like, Sam Fisher or whoever has to go through this emotional state or has to reach that guy. We just go for non-dependent objectives, and we just get rid of all that narrative burden and just focus on what makes the mission good at the core level.
If I go to my lead designer and say, I have this really cool mission where you have to listen to a conversation, you're trailing two guys and have to avoid all these guards that I've carefully placed in the village... that mission would probably be approved in the west provided I've clearly demonstrated and explained what makes it good: patrols, interesting spaces to go through, pacing ect.
But in our studio that wouldn't work, because we don't consider just moving the character - at an input level - an interesting interaction. Just moving the character and staying close enough - and what happens if you're not, do we have to restart the mission? - we don't consider this low level input experience good enough, so we're not going to do this.
But we will do chase quests, for example. You can still stop them through the game systems and you don't have to shoot. You will have to figure out a way to stop their car and then get close enough.
I don't understand why so many people are calling so many games open-world games when they're not. There is usually a fundamental distinction between mission mode and free roam mode. When you play a lot of open-world games, you're actually inside a corridor you're forbidden to leave, or you're set on a course of action you can't derail from. You might be inside a city, but you're inside a corridor inside a city. Is that open-world? I'm not sure.