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Developers of stealth games talk about stealth

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DalekFlay This one's for you: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-23-stealth-vs-stealth

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.
 

DalekFlay

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Amaro sounds like a man who has been in a lot of meetings where people talk about money and broadening the audience base.

Bithell is both right and wrong about how possible a customized experience is. There are certainly games out there that pretend you can just remove the quest marker and play it that way if you want but that isn't actually possible because the game was designed around having it there. Oblivion and Skyrim are the best examples off the top of my head: you can mod the quest markers out entirely but then you will have no idea where to go, because all quests are designed around the marker being there. However there are indeed many examples of the opposite, games which do offer "mainstream" help mechanics but function great with them all turned off. Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dishonored and Thief spring to mind... I turned off everything, every single thing, and had no issues knowing where to go or how to do it through game dialog or common sense.

This can extend to gameplay. I don't know about the last Splinter Cell because I didn't play it, but Far Cry 3 is a good example. I played that entire game sneaking around with a bow and silenced sniper rifle, slowly picking off enemies from bases until no one was left and I got the "base taken" success screen. I also know a ton of people just stormed those bases with assault rifles and shotguns and blazed through the game as if it were an open world Doom. Crysis had similar multi-option gameplay that worked, at least in the first half. So it is indeed very possible to make a game function both as a stealth game and an action game, depending on who is playing. Metal Gear Solid 5 seems to be similarly done, if the videos I watched are any indication.

Can a hybrid do stealth as well as a "pure" stealth game though? I'm not sure. I certainly loved sneaking around with my silenced weapons in Human Revolution. I would probably put that experience on par with Dishonored, an arguably "pure" stealth game. Do either compare to Thief 2 though, a game designed entirely around only the stealth option? Probably not.
 

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If there was a real life ignore button this asshole Jordan Amaro would be clicked. No wonder Kojima tried his utmost to suicide the series.
 

Cowboy Moment

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Mike Blithell said:
pretentious indie platformer
:thumbsup:

Amaro sounds like a man who has been in a lot of meetings where people talk about money and broadening the audience base.

Bithell is both right and wrong about how possible a customized experience is. There are certainly games out there that pretend you can just remove the quest marker and play it that way if you want but that isn't actually possible because the game was designed around having it there. Oblivion and Skyrim are the best examples off the top of my head: you can mod the quest markers out entirely but then you will have no idea where to go, because all quests are designed around the marker being there. However there are indeed many examples of the opposite, games which do offer "mainstream" help mechanics but function great with them all turned off. Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dishonored and Thief spring to mind... I turned off everything, every single thing, and had no issues knowing where to go or how to do it through game dialog or common sense.

This can extend to gameplay. I don't know about the last Splinter Cell because I didn't play it, but Far Cry 3 is a good example. I played that entire game sneaking around with a bow and silenced sniper rifle, slowly picking off enemies from bases until no one was left and I got the "base taken" success screen. I also know a ton of people just stormed those bases with assault rifles and shotguns and blazed through the game as if it were an open world Doom. Crysis had similar multi-option gameplay that worked, at least in the first half. So it is indeed very possible to make a game function both as a stealth game and an action game, depending on who is playing. Metal Gear Solid 5 seems to be similarly done, if the videos I watched are any indication.

Can a hybrid do stealth as well as a "pure" stealth game though? I'm not sure. I certainly loved sneaking around with my silenced weapons in Human Revolution. I would probably put that experience on par with Dishonored, an arguably "pure" stealth game. Do either compare to Thief 2 though, a game designed entirely around only the stealth option? Probably not.

From a design standpoint, the main problem of "customizing" difficulty upwards by removing helper mechanics, is that the game is invariably built with the default in mind, and then tweaked to make "customized" approaches possible. So if the default is shit, best you can get is a polished turd.

I do wonder what would happen if someone did the opposite? How would Thief 2 play if it added "Easy" and "Consoletard" difficulty levels, which gave you full detailed maps for every level, improved combat skills, magical sight to see loot and guards through walls, and so forth? I suspect it would play like crap, but who knows, maybe the peasants would have enjoyed it.
 

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This Jordan dude is a cunt, but at least he's an honest cunt.
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!
...
Eurogamer: Then why bother with stealth in the first place?

Jordan Amaro: Because it's the essence of an already pre-existing IP.
Only making it for the money. Gotcha.
 

DalekFlay

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From a design standpoint, the main problem of "customizing" difficulty upwards by removing helper mechanics, is that the game is invariably built with the default in mind, and then tweaked to make "customized" approaches possible. So if the default is shit, best you can get is a polished turd.

I mentioned that myself, but then gave examples where I thought that was NOT the case. Playing Human Revolution with or without quest markers are both viable and natural feeling methods. I never felt like the game was designed for quest markers when playing without them.
 

Cowboy Moment

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From a design standpoint, the main problem of "customizing" difficulty upwards by removing helper mechanics, is that the game is invariably built with the default in mind, and then tweaked to make "customized" approaches possible. So if the default is shit, best you can get is a polished turd.

I mentioned that myself, but then gave examples where I thought that was NOT the case. Playing Human Revolution with or without quest markers are both viable and natural feeling methods. I never felt like the game was designed for quest markers when playing without them.

Eh, frankly, Human Revolution has such barebones stealth and constrained level design that it doesn't make too much of a difference if you have the markers or not. Ditto for FC3, which is open world, and pretty much just gives you some very basic stealth mechanics in case you got bored of being Rambo.

Besides, the problem isn't so much designing for quest markers, but designing with an audience that needs quest markers in mind. Thi4f works without the markers, but that doesn't improve everything else that is shit about the game.
 

DalekFlay

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Eh, frankly, Human Revolution has such barebones stealth and constrained level design that it doesn't make too much of a difference if you have the markers or not. Ditto for FC3, which is open world, and pretty much just gives you some very basic stealth mechanics in case you got bored of being Rambo.

Barebones stealth? Both those games are built to be 100% stealth if you want to play them that way. Human Revolution has achievements for never getting noticed, never killing anyone, etc. The real joy of Far Cry 3 is taking out an outpost without anyone ever knowing you were there, and they give you large bonuses for doing so. Just because you didn't like or play stealth in those games doesn't mean they weren't built for them.

And HR certainly had large enough hub areas to feel broken without quest arrows if they didn't have the information needed about where to go in the dialog and journal. Hence designed/works for both.

Besides, the problem isn't so much designing for quest markers, but designing with an audience that needs quest markers in mind. Thi4f works without the markers, but that doesn't improve everything else that is shit about the game.

Yes, Thief has shit level design. Human Revolution does not.
 

Cowboy Moment

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Eh, frankly, Human Revolution has such barebones stealth and constrained level design that it doesn't make too much of a difference if you have the markers or not. Ditto for FC3, which is open world, and pretty much just gives you some very basic stealth mechanics in case you got bored of being Rambo.

Barebones stealth? Both those games are built to be 100% stealth if you want to play them that way. Human Revolution has achievements for never getting noticed, never killing anyone, etc. The real joy of Far Cry 3 is taking out an outpost without anyone ever knowing you were there, and they give you large bonuses for doing so. Just because you didn't like or play stealth in those games doesn't mean they weren't built for them.

And HR certainly had large enough hub areas to feel broken without quest arrows if they didn't have the information needed about where to go in the dialog and journal. Hence designed/works for both.

I know they are built to be mostly stealthable (not 100%, you still have bossfights and shit). That doesn't make the stealth mechanics any less simplistic. I enjoyed a large part of HR, but the later stages really started to drag, which I attribute to the stealth mechanics (I mostly used stealth as well) lacking depth, and to the constrained level design. In HR, it's literally just LOS based stealth without anything to make it more interesting - not even sound propagation, as you can extremely noisily takedown guards close to others, and no fucks will be given. The levels don't have any real stealth challenges, the stealth augmentations are banalshitboring, and enemies react the same exact way in every level.

Anyway, I'm mostly talking about using options to adjust the difficulty of actual stealth gameplay, of which HR isn't a good example, because, again, turning off objective markers in that game didn't actually change much.

Besides, the problem isn't so much designing for quest markers, but designing with an audience that needs quest markers in mind. Thi4f works without the markers, but that doesn't improve everything else that is shit about the game.

Yes, Thief has shit level design. Human Revolution does not.

HR has decent-ish level design, but most of them still funnel you on a mostly linear path from A to B. You are allowed to choose how you tackle a particular segment, but that's it.

If we look at AAA games, Dishonored was significantly better in this regard, even if it still had to cut its levels into pieces in order to appease shitty last-gen consoles.
 

Metro

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HR level design isn't anything great. They do give you a few options in some of the larger rooms but for the most part it's either storm in and shoot up the place or crawl through the vent.
 

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I'm actually really looking forward to Blithell's Volume. That said, I have a tendency to use violence in stealth games even when I am undiscovered. I'm not sure why, I just don't feel comfortable with people walking about as I'm skulking. I'm afraid they are going to break behavior and walk into the room I'm in. Unless I am forcing my myself to do a stealth run I will usually take out everyone on the map.
 
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DalekFlay

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I'm actually really looking forward to Blithell's Volume. That said, I have a tendency to use violence in stealth games even when I am undiscovered. I'm not sure why, I just don't feel comfortable with people walking about as I'm skulking. I'm afraid there going to break behavior and walk into the room I'm in. Unless I am forcing my myself to do a stealth run I will usually take out everyone on the map.

I always take everyone out in stealth games too. I just like clearing rooms, then getting to walk around afterward like a free man. As long as you take everyone out stealthily and never get noticed I think this is a 100% viable way to play and love stealth games. Deus Ex HR really catered to it with the silenced pistol.
 

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I'm actually really looking forward to Blithell's Volume. That said, I have a tendency to use violence in stealth games even when I am undiscovered. I'm not sure why, I just don't feel comfortable with people walking about as I'm skulking. I'm afraid there going to break behavior and walk into the room I'm in. Unless I am forcing my myself to do a stealth run I will usually take out everyone on the map.

I always take everyone out in stealth games too. I just like clearing rooms, then getting to walk around afterward like a free man. As long as you take everyone out stealthily and never get noticed I think this is a 100% viable way to play and love stealth games. Deus Ex HR really catered to it with the silenced pistol.

For me that is what makes a stealth game a stealth game. The constant sense of danger. It's more likely for the enemy to be aware of a foreign presence if there are missing patrols, or someone doesn't answer a simple radio check.
 

DalekFlay

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For me that is what makes a stealth game a stealth game. The constant sense of danger. It's more likely for the enemy to be aware of a foreign presence if there are missing patrols, or someone doesn't answer a simple radio check.

Ghosting is also fun and yes, probably more realistic, but I also love clearing rooms. Both are rewarding for different reasons. I tend toward ghosting in the Thief series because of the character and style, but in Dishonored? I backstabbed all those dudes.
 

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I actually want that. Just not at full price.

Also:

 

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How come no one gives credit to Amaro for arguing for Thief like level design?

Jordan Amaro: I like to feel the space, scripts and systems that have been laid out before me have not been engineered for me, the player. It's difficult to explain. You play some games and all the patterns are so obvious. You play the first levels of The Last of Us, and for the sake of tutorials the human enemies stare at brick walls, waiting for you to take them down. In Assassin's Creed you have the bushes laid out strangely and assets assembled weirdly. Or patrols in Deus Ex: Human Revolution that are super short and stop right before the corners for some reason... and those vents. Those practices destroy the entire credibility of the scene, the stage, and it pulls me out of the game since I'm shown the patterns. In other words, the aesthetics have effectively yielded before the mechanics and the game world has transgressed itself to reach the player, instead of staying true to itself.

Mike Bithell: I wonder if that's simply because you've got the game design brain. I'm a massive Assassin's Creed fan, and I must admit I really like the what the ridiculous amounts of foliage do in the new one. It makes me feel much more badass than I've ever felt in an Assassin's Creed game. It's that stealth badassery. The fact you can't lose a sword fight in Assassin's Creed ever isn't interesting to me, because that's not my wish fulfilment.

Jordan Amaro: Doesn't it insult your intelligence? You know, your right to improvise and experiment?

Mike Bithell: It does, but crucially for me it allows me to role-play being that clever.

Bithell in contrast literally pronounces his love for popamole

Mike Bithell: The Last of Us was intentionally old-school in its design. The stealth sections in The Last of Us feel like Metal Gear Solid 1 to me. And that's why I loved them. This is where our tastes differ: I like seeing the cover. Gears of War is obviously the most egregious example. I like walking into an environment in Gears of War and mapping out.
 

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Because they're too lazy to click the link and only read my excerpt which didn't have those parts.

And this is why I have to copy-paste a lot.
 

DalekFlay

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In fairness when you quote so much I assume you quoted the whole thing.

Anyway Amaro doesn't strike me as an idiot or even a man with bad taste, he strikes me as someone making what he and his bosses see as profitable rather than good. So his comments there don't surprise me.
 

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But from reading the whole interview, he seems to follow the more systemic, less deliberately crafted school of level design. I think that is a natural evolution for a game like MGS. But he seems to make it out as if previous MGS games didn't have organically laid out levels. It's just that now you have one big open level without the in-between loading...
 

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