AwesomeButton
Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
What prompted me to write this is watching the latest gameplay from The Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk. I've always been annoyed with 1st person games where you have stealth mechanics, but the locations and the enemies have been designed in such a way that stealth is more or less optional. Even if you are caught, you can easily massacre the bad guys and still reach your objectives. I guess that was why I was so let down by Dishonored too.
In my opinion failing a stealth segment should ideally either 1) result in the PC death 9/10 times, or 2) cause significant gameplay or story consequences. Otherwise there were no real stakes and no reason for the player not to kill everyone in his path.
Seeing modern games resort to superfluous stealth, just so they can attach it to their "list of features" makes me feel like the designers are trying to take me for a ride.
A separate topic is that a game that takes stealth seriously should take the effort to present the player with varied tools for stealth gameplay. Let's just enumerate what various good stealth games have in addition to being able to hide in shadows and produce more or less sound while moving, which I'd say is the bare minimum for having any sort of stealth:
- Thief had flashbombs, gas, ability to turn lights off, ability to cause distractions, ability to peek around corners, ability to use a mechanical eye to zoom, ability to use a remote-controlled camera which you could throw - similar to how you throw a flashbomb
- Deus Ex had the ability to see through walls with the right augmentations
- Splinter Cell Chaos Theory added some fun acrobatic and climbing possibilities, as well as the ability to hide the sounds you produce within louder background noises (shooting weapons during thunders in a storm). It also had low light and thermal vision
- Splinter Cell Double Agent added something very cool but sadly only used in scripted moments - the ability to remotely eavesdrop on people with some kind of laser-powered device.
- Hitman has disguises that function more or less as a puzzle game where you need one disguise to proceed and get another down the line, and they allow you a limited time window of exposure before you are uncovered and you need to use this window to do something important towards your objective.
Most games with stealth nowadays have only a small part of this toolset, some don't even have shadows that function as cover. Shadows can function as cover at night, favorite example of mine: https://youtu.be/YQzLC_ZGEbA?t=22
So, I'm putting this for discussion - how much of a stealth gameplay do you expect from ToW and Cyberpunk? What is known so far on this subject, and will we get anything better than "hide behind crates"?
In my opinion failing a stealth segment should ideally either 1) result in the PC death 9/10 times, or 2) cause significant gameplay or story consequences. Otherwise there were no real stakes and no reason for the player not to kill everyone in his path.
Seeing modern games resort to superfluous stealth, just so they can attach it to their "list of features" makes me feel like the designers are trying to take me for a ride.
A separate topic is that a game that takes stealth seriously should take the effort to present the player with varied tools for stealth gameplay. Let's just enumerate what various good stealth games have in addition to being able to hide in shadows and produce more or less sound while moving, which I'd say is the bare minimum for having any sort of stealth:
- Thief had flashbombs, gas, ability to turn lights off, ability to cause distractions, ability to peek around corners, ability to use a mechanical eye to zoom, ability to use a remote-controlled camera which you could throw - similar to how you throw a flashbomb
- Deus Ex had the ability to see through walls with the right augmentations
- Splinter Cell Chaos Theory added some fun acrobatic and climbing possibilities, as well as the ability to hide the sounds you produce within louder background noises (shooting weapons during thunders in a storm). It also had low light and thermal vision
- Splinter Cell Double Agent added something very cool but sadly only used in scripted moments - the ability to remotely eavesdrop on people with some kind of laser-powered device.
- Hitman has disguises that function more or less as a puzzle game where you need one disguise to proceed and get another down the line, and they allow you a limited time window of exposure before you are uncovered and you need to use this window to do something important towards your objective.
Most games with stealth nowadays have only a small part of this toolset, some don't even have shadows that function as cover. Shadows can function as cover at night, favorite example of mine: https://youtu.be/YQzLC_ZGEbA?t=22
So, I'm putting this for discussion - how much of a stealth gameplay do you expect from ToW and Cyberpunk? What is known so far on this subject, and will we get anything better than "hide behind crates"?