On Dishonored and the inherent inferiority of the stealth ImSim.

[PorkyThePaladin]

Been playing Dishonored and I realized 2 things:

1. The game is well designed within the scope of its aims. Mechanics are well done, the world is interesting, graphics are good, everything is top notch.
2. It's not a particularly good game. I was really bored toward the end.

How can these two seemingly conflicting things both be true?

Well, imho, Dishonored is a great lesson in why the stealth based branch of the ImSim tree is inherently inferior to the other ones (cerebral or combat or mix). It started with Thief, let's make a game where combat is discouraged and stealth is the intended way. The problem with these games is that stealth is just not that interesting as a fundamental and sole gameplay mechanic.

1. It's extremely slow paced. You crawl into a new area, and then you gotta observe the guard patterns for a while, to understand how to proceed, then you gotta slowly stealth past them, then you will inevitably fail a few times and have to retry. Doing all this hundreds of times through the game is just so much more boring than other types of gameplay.

2. It rewards "perfect" gameplay versus "dynamic" gameplay, which also contributes to boredom. To elaborate: Let's say you have a combat/mix based game, you go into a fight, you fuck up (e.g. miss a few shots, miss a grenade toss, accidentally aggro way too many enemies, etc). You might very well die, but you can also adapt and try stuff: try to run away and come back, stealth situationally, take out the massive enemy numbers with your great shooting skills, etc. So even when you fail, you are still having fun. But in stealth based games, failing generally leads to a reload, either because the game is not meant to tolerate failure (e.g. aggroing multiple guards in Thieft typically means death) or because you will miss out on some Ghost rating (Dishonored). So you are forced to pursue perfect gameplay and to do this via many reloads at the slightest error. Definition of boring.

3. Trial and error vs skill: as stealth based games wind down toward the end, there is pressure on them to ratchet up the difficulty, so by the final levels, you are tasked with making it through herds of bad guys and giant robots with lasers and cameras on every asshole and so on. So the gameplay of the early game, which was reasonably fun turns into trial and error bullshit as you try to sneak through a million gazes undetected, inevitably having to try over and over and over again.

 

[Lemming42]

Said it in previous Thief threads but the way to fix stealth imsims is to make guards wake up after being knocked out (and, ideally, remove the player's ability to just straight-up kill guards, as this trivialises everything in both Thief and Dishonored).

Combine this with guards noticing when their companions have gone missing and initiating searches, plus things like letting the player lock doors (to trap guards in closets and such) and have a limited number of ropes/handcuffs/etc to bind KO'd enemies. You can see some of this in Desperados. Ideally, there'd also be limited knockouts per mission - none of Thief's blackjack or Dishonored's choke-out bullshit.

This brings the "dynamic" gameplay you're looking for: the genre goes from "stand in the shadows, wait til guard walks past, walk to next shadows" into a game of infinite choice and consequence, where the player will constantly be weighing up the risks and benefits of dealing with any given guard. You might want to knock a guard out to be safe, but how will you deal with them? They'll wake up soon, so you may need to bind them - but maybe you have no bindings, and even if you do, guards can untie their friends. So you'll need to find a good hiding place with a lockable door or some other similar barrier to prevent the victim escaping or being quickly found when they awaken. However, maybe you want them to be found - cause a commotion in one area as you abscond into the next, or have a troublesome guard leave their post to look for a missing comrade, trusting that by the time they find and untie their friend and the alarm is raised, you'll be out of there.

 

[Tyranicon]

My preferred way to play any stealth game where violence is optional is to embrace violence whole-heartedly.

While you were using water arrows to douse torches in Thief, I was throwing guards into cooking fires to turn Lord Bafford's Manor into a charnel house.

 

[Spukrian]

1. It's extremely slow paced. You crawl into a new area, and then you gotta observe the guard patterns for a while, to understand how to proceed, then you gotta slowly stealth past them, then you will inevitably fail a few times and have to retry. Doing all this hundreds of times through the game is just so much more boring than other types of gameplay.

Going slow and watching guards is part of the fun in a stealth game, maybe stealth games aren't for you?

2. It rewards "perfect" gameplay versus "dynamic" gameplay, which also contributes to boredom. To elaborate: Let's say you have a combat/mix based game, you go into a fight, you fuck up (e.g. miss a few shots, miss a grenade toss, accidentally aggro way too many enemies, etc). You might very well die, but you can also adapt and try stuff: try to run away and come back, stealth situationally, take out the massive enemy numbers with your great shooting skills, etc. So even when you fail, you are still having fun. But in stealth based games, failing generally leads to a reload, either because the game is not meant to tolerate failure (e.g. aggroing multiple guards in Thieft typically means death) or because you will miss out on some Ghost rating (Dishonored). So you are forced to pursue perfect gameplay and to do this via many reloads at the slightest error. Definition of boring.

This sounds like a problem with you, not Dishonored. There is absolutely no need to get the Ghost rating so you aren't actually forced to stealth. It's an optional challenge for those who want it.

3. Trial and error vs skill: as stealth based games wind down toward the end, there is pressure on them to ratchet up the difficulty, so by the final levels, you are tasked with making it through herds of bad guys and giant robots with lasers and cameras on every asshole and so on. So the gameplay of the early game, which was reasonably fun turns into trial and error bullshit as you try to sneak through a million gazes undetected, inevitably having to try over and over and over again.

Again, there is no actual need to go undetected. I don't think I've ever played a stealth game where detection is an instant game over.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

1. It's extremely slow paced. You crawl into a new area, and then you gotta observe the guard patterns for a while, to understand how to proceed, then you gotta slowly stealth past them, then you will inevitably fail a few times and have to retry. Doing all this hundreds of times through the game is just so much more boring than other types of gameplay.

Going slow and watching guards is part of the fun in a stealth game, maybe stealth games aren't for you?

2. It rewards "perfect" gameplay versus "dynamic" gameplay, which also contributes to boredom. To elaborate: Let's say you have a combat/mix based game, you go into a fight, you fuck up (e.g. miss a few shots, miss a grenade toss, accidentally aggro way too many enemies, etc). You might very well die, but you can also adapt and try stuff: try to run away and come back, stealth situationally, take out the massive enemy numbers with your great shooting skills, etc. So even when you fail, you are still having fun. But in stealth based games, failing generally leads to a reload, either because the game is not meant to tolerate failure (e.g. aggroing multiple guards in Thieft typically means death) or because you will miss out on some Ghost rating (Dishonored). So you are forced to pursue perfect gameplay and to do this via many reloads at the slightest error. Definition of boring.

This sounds like a problem with you, not Dishonored. There is absolutely no need to get the Ghost rating so you aren't actually forced to stealth. It's an optional challenge for those who want it.

3. Trial and error vs skill: as stealth based games wind down toward the end, there is pressure on them to ratchet up the difficulty, so by the final levels, you are tasked with making it through herds of bad guys and giant robots with lasers and cameras on every asshole and so on. So the gameplay of the early game, which was reasonably fun turns into trial and error bullshit as you try to sneak through a million gazes undetected, inevitably having to try over and over and over again.

Again, there is no actual need to go undetected. I don't think I've ever played a stealth game where detection is an instant game over.

Yes, you don't have to get the Ghost rating, or be undetected, but what else is the point in games like this? Combat is too easy and not fun enough (in Dishonored) and impossible (in Thief on hardest difficulty). So they kinda "force" you into playing that way.

 

[Spukrian]

The option to run away and hide always exists, a much better choice than reloading a quicksave in my opinion.

 

[Lemming42]

Again, there is no actual need to go undetected. I don't think I've ever played a stealth game where detection is an instant game over.

It doesn't technically end the game but it does typically bring the fun to a total halt because your options are either fight or run, and either one causes the game to fall apart. In Thief for example, the guards are revealed to have incredibly poor AI if you run from them (and you'll probably just bunny-hop through the rest of the level since you no longer have a motivation to stay hidden, and no guard will ever be able to catch you), and if you fight, you'll have to contend with the poor swordplay or resort to things like the flash bomb which just ruin the game.

Pretty much all the effort went into the stealth mechanics, as soon as those go out the window then it turns into a farce where nothing really works properly. I can't really think of a way around this; there's no real failure state in a stealth game that's fun, because you either end up just turning it into an action game (as in Dishonored) or you have to come up with something weird like the player being captured. You can also have re-stealth mechanics but those are always sort of silly; the player crouches in a bush and goes afk for two minutes and then the guards just forget everything that happened and go back on patrol next to the corpses of their friends.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

After getting bored of constant stealth in Dishonored, I played a couple of levels combat heavy, and it was really bad. Pure cheat mode type stuff (e.g. stop time and kill whatever you want while it's frozen), or uncanny valley type stuff like shooting guards in the head with the upgraded flintlock pistol over and over and over, or try to fight them with sword but then they shoot you from 20 sides. It's not really possible in a fun way, as Lemming42 says above.

 

[Machocruz]

When I realized that Dishonored was a mixed approach game contrary to the widespread and mistaken belief that it was a Stealth First game....it didn't make it any better. Both combat and stealth are trivially easy, and worse that it's so trivially easy to just kill everything, stealth loses any purpose outside of "cuz I want to." Sneaking is a thing in the real world because of necessity, and since real world stealth is where video games got the concept of stealth...

But Dishonored is total player empowerment, as most AAA games of its era were; no significant danger, no significant obstacles. Pure stealth like Thief can/does come with the issues mentioned, but at least the stealth reflects real world purposes (e.g. to deal with opposition that would almost surely end you in direct confrontation). I also have to agree with Lemming42 that games like Desperados reconcile the issues better, though I'm more familiar with Commandos. It also helps that both stealth and some direct combat are viable but not piss easy in those games.

 

[Nutmeg]

So the gameplay of the early game, which was reasonably fun turns into trial and error bullshit as you try to sneak through a million gazes undetected, inevitably having to try over and over and over again.

you will inevitably fail a few times and have to retry.

So you are forced to pursue perfect gameplay and to do this via many reloads at the slightest error.

Porky hates challenge. The post.

 

[Silverfish]

It's not really possible in a fun way,

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

You are like my bud Desiderius , who played Cuckfinder: Poncemaker for over 2000 hours to prove some point. Real men of genius, I salute you.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

For the console peasant, Dishonored must have felt like a revelation back then. I agree though that playing it today no longer satisfies me. The action path is awesome-button mode, and stealth still feels too easy and contrived.

 

[Hell Swarm]

1. It's extremely slow paced. You crawl into a new area, and then you gotta observe the guard patterns for a while, to understand how to proceed, then you gotta slowly stealth past them, then you will inevitably fail a few times and have to retry. Doing all this hundreds of times through the game is just so much more boring than other types of gameplay.

Stealth in gaming is a failed concept. You either need cheating radar/camera to look round corners or you spend your entire play time sitting around doing nothing learning to solve the exact puzzle the game designer put in place. The only exception I can think of is Hitman and that has the same problem of gamified stealth means guards are easy to lore away or have a set pattern you can exploit.

Said it in previous Thief threads but the way to fix stealth imsims is to make guards wake up after being knocked out (and, ideally, remove the player's ability to just straight-up kill guards, as this trivialises everything in both Thief and Dishonored).

Hitman does that already but you can hide bodies in lockers and stuff to remove them from the map entirely. It doesn't solve the core problem of stealth games being stealth (pun intended) puzzle games. The genre needs to pick up on the AI stuff going on and start using it to improve NPC actions. Targets need to be suspicious if you follow them too long or you start acting weird.

Is arkham asylum and Tenchu the best stealth series? Both use a lot of verticality and give you ways to stay above your targets. Don't need radar as much when you can look down and plan what you're doing. Dishonoured has verticality too but the level design is more cinematic and it has to rely on a ping since it's first person.

 

[Fedora Master]

Dishonored was only successful because Stealthfags are starved and will happily eat anything. The world building is meh, all the characters are unlikeable, their design is ugly and most of all the game invalidates its own premise with the magic system. Unsurprisingly it also turned into woke slop soon after.

 

[Spukrian]

So if I understand correctly:
Some people here think that stealth games (or at least Thief and Dishonored) are bad because if you're detected one of the following happens:
*player reloads a save, that isn't fun
*player engages in combat, that isn't fun
*player runs away and hides, that isn't fun

Well, how would you guys solve the problem then? What would a GOOD and FUN (in your opinions) stealth game do when the played fucks up and is detected?

Is there any game out there that doesn't deal with detection in the ways I outlined above?

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Dishonored is a sort of spiritual successor of shit games like thief which is why it sucks.

 

[luj1]

On Porky and his inherent ability to spew shit takes

 

[Losus4]

Dishonored is a sort of spiritual successor of shit games like thief which is why it sucks.

I partially agree, in that yes, the Thief games are quite crap, but Dishonored itself is excellent. The game is best when played with no powers or HUD. You can get more fully immersed in the world if you're not blinking around all the time.

The thief games only play and being stealth games, but the AI is so enormously stupid that most levels you can simply run to the goal. IF you want a proper stealth game get Far Cry 2.

 

[NecroLord]

Said it in previous Thief threads but the way to fix stealth imsims is to make guards wake up after being knocked out (and, ideally, remove the player's ability to just straight-up kill guards, as this trivialises everything in both Thief and Dishonored).

Combine this with guards noticing when their companions have gone missing and initiating searches, plus things like letting the player lock doors (to trap guards in closets and such) and have a limited number of ropes/handcuffs/etc to bind KO'd enemies. You can see some of this in Desperados. Ideally, there'd also be limited knockouts per mission - none of Thief's blackjack or Dishonored's choke-out bullshit.

This brings the "dynamic" gameplay you're looking for: the genre goes from "stand in the shadows, wait til guard walks past, walk to next shadows" into a game of infinite choice and consequence, where the player will constantly be weighing up the risks and benefits of dealing with any given guard. You might want to knock a guard out to be safe, but how will you deal with them? They'll wake up soon, so you may need to bind them - but maybe you have no bindings, and even if you do, guards can untie their friends. So you'll need to find a good hiding place with a lockable door or some other similar barrier to prevent the victim escaping or being quickly found when they awaken. However, maybe you want them to be found - cause a commotion in one area as you abscond into the next, or have a troublesome guard leave their post to look for a missing comrade, trusting that by the time they find and untie their friend and the alarm is raised, you'll be out of there.

Guards shouldn't wake up because it doesn't make sense, as each mission shouldn't take you longer than 1 hour and a half (and that's for the big missions) to complete.

 

[markec]

Said it in previous Thief threads but the way to fix stealth imsims is to make guards wake up after being knocked out (and, ideally, remove the player's ability to just straight-up kill guards, as this trivialises everything in both Thief and Dishonored).

I hate this idea as seen some games when a guard wakes up after few minutes and just continues as nothing happened. Like it's normal for a person to suddenly collapses for few minutes and teleports to nearby bush.

What you should have louder noise when taking out someone. More guards to cover each other and patrols and cameras to raise alarm if anyone is missing. Making risky knocking out anyone but some isolated targets. The gameplay should be about diversions and finding routs to bypass guards and cameras and not engaging them directly.

This was already done better with non human enemies in both Thief games as it was just not feasible to knock out every enemy but forced you to find a way to sneak past them.

 

[Lemming42]

Guards shouldn't wake up because it doesn't make sense, as each mission shouldn't take you longer than 1 hour and a half (and that's for the big missions) to complete.

It's the opposite, surely? Guards never waking up is the option that makes no sense, because it means that your knockout abilities are godlike (especially given how easy they are to pull off in literally every stealth game, usually a single button press).

You can see in games like Hitman 2 or Desperados or Commandos that having guards reawaken adds endless gameplay possibilities which simply don't exist in the likes of Thief or Dishonored, bolstered by the AI's capabiltiies in these games generally being far better than Thief or Dishonored. In Thief or Dishonored, you press the magic KO button (left click for blackjack absolutely is magic KO) while behind someone, the guard is permanently gone, you do this enough times and the "stealth game" now consists of just walking around an empty level with no threat. In Desperados or Commandos, you KO someone and now there's a countdown to them getting up and raising the alarm, so you need to get someone over there who can tie them up, then you need to move them to somewhere where they won't be found, but now the other guards have noticed their missing friend and are changing their routes so you'll be forced to adapt your plans.

I hate this idea as seen some games when a guard wakes up after few minutes and just continues as nothing happened. Like it's normal for a person to suddenly collapses for few minutes and teleports to nearby bush.

I can't think of any games where that happens - in Hitman 2 and Commandos/Desperados, people who wake up after being KO'd are pissed off and looking for you. I think in Hitman 2 they straight-up raise the alarm and your current disguise becomes useless, but it's been a while since I've played it. Though I agree the systems to handle an awakened guard's behaviour, and the behaviour of their allies, should be far more robust.

 

[NecroLord]

There are some guards in Thief 2 which can't be knocked out.
Those with the big helmets and also those Mechanists with the helmets fully covering their head.
Yeah, in Hitman it's a whole different thing.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

In Thief, if stealth fails, you still can run away, often you can find creative way to escape exploiting the environment (mantling, locking doors, reaching unaccessible spots with rope arrows, etc). You can put your pursuers to the wrong track with noise arrows (you can use anything to make noises, even throwing objects). Or you can just fight back, if you aren't outnumbered. Stealth failure is rarely a true fail state.

The problem is that many autistics think that "ghosting" is the true way to play this game, but forget that it was meant to be played in a different way.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

In Thief, if stealth fails, you still can run away, often you can find creative way to escape exploiting the environment (mantling, locking doors, reaching unaccessible spots with rope arrows, etc). You can put your pursuers to the wrong track with noise arrows (you can use anything to make noises, even throwing objects). Or you can just fight back, if you aren't outnumbered. Stealth failure is rarely a true fail state.

The problem is that many autistics think that "ghosting" is the true way to play this game, but forget that it was meant to be played in a different way.

I feel like Dishonored treats detection of the player as a fail state by branding it as the "bad ending". It effectively is. The best ending is achieved by sneaking and avoiding killing. The DLC changes character, one that is actually a killer, which makes it feel like high chaos (killing) is the way to go, and ironically, it works, because a major character can be killed (Billie) and it doesn't feel like you truly lost anything. While Corvo and Emily's relationship going astray feels much more impactful, if you care about that.