What are your thoughts on Red Dead 2's stealth, a game that prioritizes firefights but also gives you pretty weak armor, has plenty of sections dedicated to stealth, multiple options for stealth, and has pretty competent AIs. Obviously Don't take my word as gospel, you should always do your own research.
there are two things that makes a good game fun to play… the first is rewards… but focising on reward is a common mistake especially because reward doesn't even have to be actual rewards or actually rewarding. the second is features… whut can you do in game… most games tend to have generic features… which is why they aren't enjoyable excwpt when they are rewarding you. this i think is whats missing in stealth games… features. thi?gs like more abilities more unique abilities and more locations.
Too much stealth relies on waiting around for an opportunity to do something. And if you hesitate and miss that window, then you've got to wait even more.
@@taylorpennington8126 StealthGamerBr replays a game countless times to memorize enemy ai, pathing and timing for each level before making his videos. His gameplay does not reflect how a typical player would play a game. His gameplay is amazing, but it came from hundreds of hours of playtime and mastery.
mgs V executed the stealth progression perfectly in my opinion, the more you do something, the more enemies will develop new tactics to defend against yours, such as if you are constantly sniping enemies and shooting them in the head, they will start wearing body armor and helmets, and if you keep infiltrating bases unseen, they will bring out flashlights and spotlights
That Kind Of Progression Is Why I Love The Batman Arkham Series Of Stealth. Especially Arkham Knight In This Department. The More Harder Predator Sections Feature Guys With Disruptors That Disable Detective Mode, Medics That Can Revive Downed Enemies And Electrify Them To Make Them Immune To Stealth Takedowns from Behind, Guys With Thermal Goggles And Guys With Mines That Make Using Gargoyles Harder, ETC. And That's Only The Enemy Types! Their Behavior Can Also Change To Adapt To Your Playstyle. Use Vents Too Much? Enemies Start Checking Vents. Gargoyles? Enemies Start Shooting Down Gargoyles. Sneaking Up Behind People? Enemies Start Looking Behind Them. Hell If You Use The Voice Synthesizer Too Much, They'll Straight Up Stop Listening To Their Commander! It Forces You To Change Your Strategy On The Fly To Adapt To The Situation And I Love It!
It's too bad that by the halfway point, you could buy upgrades and weapons that made stealth pretty much pointless unless you really wanted to be sneaky. Action-focused progression eventually overshadowed stealth progression. Even the scoring system rewarded fast action more than perfect stealth.
I think Last of Us on it’s grounded mode presents a very unique style of Guerilla Stealth. The game creates a scenario where both a straight gun fight and a typical “slowly crouch behind everyone” scenario don’t work well, so you’re incentivized to mix stealth and combat constantly while having to manually keep track of enemy positioning since they themselves can sneak around and flank you.
This exactly. Starting off as Ellie, I was very much used to crouch and approach from the first game only to have a WLF guy turn around randomly on me. I very quickly learned to switch my play style from pure stealth to literal hit and run. Sneak by who I can, set up traps for those in my way, shoot an enemy that's on the opposite side of my goal, and run like hell once the chaos starts.
I agree, my playthrough was horrible stealth was the only way I could play I had trouble finding ammo and when I did have it it'd go away in the forced combat sections before everyone was dead. I'd be forced to try and get to people even though they basically one shot me because I had no ammo in these sections. It was hell. But the stealth parts were genuinely good because I knew I needed to do it in order to do the forced combat later. But I liked the stealth in the last of us anyway, I actually hate when games force combat if there is a stealth option. I go from feeling like a ghost who can shit on people, to a walking gun, which I find a little annoying in games with a big incentive on stealth. I will say however that when you break stealth in a stealth game it should be difficult to regain it, if I play a stealth game and break stealth I'd usually restart and try to perfect the level. I think that's the fun part, learning patterns and finding more efficient routes and other mechanics like how far a sound can be heard or how far you can be before you're spotted add into the mix. Granted, it's stressful, but I feel that's a good thing as a stealth game being spotted defeats the purpose of it.
I dunno if you played the older Thief games but you didn’t just rely on sight to know where enemies are, you hear them too. And not through an x-ray vision feature called “hearing mode” but instead through the sound design; all the enemies have audible footsteps and will talk to themselves or roar frequently. I stop at every corner and door and listen for anyone on the other side in Thief 2. It feels much more immersive than marking enemies to me. I think horror stealth games solve that gratification problem you were talking about. I’m sure people don’t feel rewarded when in the midst of sneaking pass the xenomporh in Alien Isolation or whatever the hell that thing in Amnesia: The Bunker is, but when they succeed they feel rewarded by being spared an encounter with the scary monster they’re afraid of. There's an upcoming stealth game based on the A Quiet Place films, I'm looking forward to it.
and the sound design was great with reverb that let you guess how big the next room was and how far a enemy was away. Love Thief 1 and 2 and Black Parade Mod that came out just the year.
Manhunt does this on Hardcore mode you have no mini map but they offten talk allot so you can hear them that way. Older stealth games had much smarter ways to do stealth.
He's a zoomer whos primary point of refernce for stealth games is modern asscreed and that weird isometric cowboy game, of course he hasn't played the old thief games.
The word "filtered" is a bit weird. Because the point of where people start seeing something as a problem rather than a feature gets really blurred. Worst part is when they start to tolerate genuine problems and call it "filtering", Fromsoft haven't fixed their camera for eternity and they're going to get away with it because of their ride or die fans defending them.
@@weirdbro6597 True, but i genuinely believe that games like movies and other medias should focus on a certain public instead of trying making it appealing to everyone. Cuz' most of time that games or movies tries to appeals to every single person, it just comes out a boring mediocre work (Examples: most of Ubisoft games and Hollywood movies). That's why many AAA games feels so soulless, cuz' the executives and "gamer" journalists don't f*cking care that video-games are a form of art too.
That's why I hate it when I would watch people play a stealth game😂 because waiting would make your life so much easier. You're purposely making it hard for yourself because you can't wait. And then they complain about it
13:30 I think the Arkham games perfected the evolution of stealth sections, predator rooms in the beginning of each game are usually simple in design and have basic enemies with guns. But as you progress further and have more gadgets so do your enemies, they introduce brutes which can’t be taken out silently like normal, medics that can revive ko’d enemies, detective mode jammers that mess with your primary way of tracking enemies, detective mode locators so that you don’t rely on it too much and so on. Enemy AI also evolves and they start noticing your patterns of you took out their friends and react accordingly, like they start checking vantage points when you took out an enemy from above, the smoke you out of the vents and start to buddy up and place mines when you knock them out from behind, it’s fun to adapt to those scenarios and how to plan on the fly.
Also I feel like you dismissed the consequences of being seen In the Arkham games by saying you can simply reset, the enemies actively punish you if they see you grappling up to a vantage point or going through a grate and start to actively limit those options.
They're stealth puzzles, set pieces, not genuine stealth. Which isn't to say they're not fun - they very much are, but they're not really what diehard stealth fans are after.
The real problem is gamers. Too harsh on stealth and players are turned away because it's not fun. When stealth is forgiving, then hardcore gamers have a problem. So game devs typically lean towards the one that will earn them more fans and/or money. Basic stealth.
Something Watch Dogs did was escalation of violence. In Legion, if you’re attacking a base with stealth attacks and are caught, guards react with batons and melee combat. Failing the fight means arrest. If you shoot people, they shoot back - which can lead to the death of the given operator. So you get less punishment for messing up the stealthy approach, and it has an interesting message for US cops.
In my opinion, the best way to make stealth as a mechanic work is by giving a "soft stealth" approach, meaning you rely more on remaining out of sight than out of mind. Forgiving stealth mechanics can work, but having enemies straight up forget that I just killed someone in front of them kills the immersion. For instance, when I played Ghost of Tsushima, I focused more on remaining out of sight when clearing camps rather than trying to take everyone out with stealth. Opening a fight with an assassination, killing two more people, and then getting out of sight to confuse the enemies was much more fun and much less clunky than just stabbing everyone in the back. I think the best way to describe it would be a "something's wrong, but I don't know what" type of stealth.
You mean Ghosting, in Thief hardcore "supreme ghost" rule requires the player to return all keys you stole, close doors you opened, not a single alert comment from guards and leave the scene of crime as the same state of your originally entered. That also means some loots cant be taken and have to substract from the total loot count of the level.
Shadow of Mordor/War did that too. If you're out of sight of all enemies, you can do stealth attacks - but they'll keep searching for you once spotted basically indefinitely. The end result is enemies feel exploitable, but not stupid, and you really are incentivized to mix stealth and combat however you want.
One of the coolest parts of Dishonored is that when you mess up stealth and go on a high chaos run, the game gets more infested with rats, there are more guards and those guards are more accurate. So the game is telling you, "hey, you CAN mess up and not do stealth and just kill everyone, but the entire game will get harder with each level and your allies will start to distrust you. Many modern games that have stealth just have it as a kinda quick way to go about killing enemies without having to fight them head on. And also, as a whole, pure stealth games have gone away because it's too niche, when the action adventure and open world landscape is just so massive right now.
Interesting that you like the chaos system. I've seen several people complain that it stops them from using the more violent powers. Personally I think it really ties into a major theme of the game- temptation of power. The Outsider gives you these powers asking if you'll give in to violence like the marked before or hold back. It's a great example of game mechanics meshing with story, but it seems some people can't get past combat=gameplay.
@@adams13245 As someone who loves Dishonored and stealth gameplay, I don't think the ludonarrative justification is enough for the sheer amount of tools that are useless on nonlethal runs. I think stuff like the sword combat and Shadow Kill is more than fun & strong enough for the plot's point to be made- The game didn't need abilities like Windblast to also be completely useless for stealthy runs. The problem is allieviated to a solid extent in D2 and it doesn't cause that ludonarrative point to suffer IMO. _(note: I also think the plot's point could've been stronger if the consequences and rewards for doing things like working with Granny Rags were more potent, max runes requiring a high chaos run would've been cool)_ PREY does a similar thing in a much more subtle way, and while I adore that game too, trying to play it like a stealth game is a total mess, so the _(much more mild)_ ludonarrative judgement feels misplaced in that game.
@@darthvaderreviews6926 Yeah Dishonored 1 definitely did not make playing nonlethal great. I wish they would have used an inventory system where you can store up to 20 darts but you can choose the dart type. I agree D2 was much better than D1 in terms of playstyle options. I'm surprised you didn't mention Death of the Outsider as having a good nonlethal playthrough options. I would argue that DotO was the best in the series in that respect. Hook mines, hyperbaric grenades, hagpearls, electrobolts, chloroform bottles, and the opium tincture give you a lot of options with how to play nonlethally. I also like your points about consequences and rewards. I wish DotO would allow you to go for a Flesh and Steel/no powers run, and I miss being able to save NPCs like in the previous games, but in terms of nonlethal options the game is really fantastic. It also makes nonlethal runs more fun than lethal because the hyperbaric grenade and hook mine ragdolls are hilarious.
I think an underrated pick from the last 10 years for stealth is watch dogs 2. Stealth is incentivised because enemies are actually powerful enough to kill you in just a few seconds. There's a lot of creative things you can do with the hacking to create chaos and distractions, there's also the possibility of doing "ghost" stealth in creative ways with the use of the gadgets, robots, and hacking. And the use of hacking an enemies phone and nearby objects to distract them eliminates the "waiting" phase many modern stealth games have that disincentivizes stealth for a lot of people.
Dude some of the most fun I had was just sitting in the corner and completing an objective without even stepping inside the building even ones. It felt amazing.
Watch Dogs 2 is soooo much fun. IMHO they should've scrapped guns altogether and only given you nonlethal weapons like tasers and the paintball rifle, that's the best way to play the game and it makes way more sense for a bunch of cheeky hackers trying to take down the system.
@@matman000000 I half agree, I feel like it makes sense for them to have guns in the more serious parts of the game when you're killing gang members lol. But I also feel like the game could've done without that story beat
2 and legion were great about this, they really felt more like immersive sims with how open their missions were, I don't get why people hate legion that much when it's that but without the cringe "hello fellow kids" characters.
As someone who loves stealth games, I've found the best way for me to engage with the mechanics in games like Ghost of Tsushima is to just crank the difficulty up. When you feel like you sort of have to be sneaky because if you get seen you'll probably be killed, it feels like a more natural playstyle. If its just as easy, and far quicker, to just walk up and kill everyone then it doesn't feel like stealthbis needed. But if one or two alerted enemies can actually be dangerous then you'll take sneaking around more seriously. Personally I also like the OG Splinter Cells approach of "Don't kill anyone for narrative reasons", and alerted enemies are much harder to take down non-lethally. But I appreciate that this just incentivises save-scumming.
If you’re playing the Arkham games on hard (the way the games were seemingly designed to be played on) then you absolutely cannot just brute force your way through stealth encounters by running away or trying to out-combat everyone each time you’re caught. Just 2-3 enemies concentrating you with guns will melt Batman and it still takes time to grapple up to a gargoyle or jump into a vent and even when you do get into a gargoyle/vent they’ll continue shooting at you until you get further away. In City-Knight the thugs will adapt if you keep using the same strategies over and over by destroying gargoyles, frequently checking over ledges, checking vents, disrupting detective vision, sporadically checking their back, and they’ll stop checking out player-caused noise makers if you use them too much. It’s not the most intricate stealth gameplay ever but it’s not just a brainless system with lobotomies for enemies and it does an excellent job at making you feel like Batman methodically picking off a room full of armed henchmen. (To see what a shitty version of Arkham stealth looks like check out Bioshock BaS pt2)
I don't think stealth sucks, it's just that most modern AAA titles just suck, and add stealth as a tack on like you were going over, which I agree with, but I just.. don't think it's fair to focus mostly on these games though as you said it's more of a afterthought. Problem is that stealth, like real stealth a long the lines of Dishonored, Arkham, Thief, Splinter Cell, Hitman, etc. Those games creates a lot of friction, thing is, players don't have a lot of patience and as you said attention spans are slimmer. Devs are just trying to create titles that can sell, which just resulted in a lot of these games not being present (ofc there's exceptions like Arkham and MGS being very successful and their reasons for not being made atm is very different from the others) but you get the point.
@@CHEESEpuff69 Its clearly hyperbole if you watch the video. The video is basically a critique on the shortcomings and pitfalls of designing stealth games and maybe how we can address those problems
I like how stealth is done in the Thief games. No magical crouching, detection bars, just the light/dark manipulation and attention to the surfaces you step on.
It's both amazing and pathetic that Thief 1 and 2, games which are older than many of the people watching this video, managed to solve pretty much all these problems while running on hardware that was barely more powerful than a potato.
Rip thief 4. I played that when it released and I had fun but I don't remember it being very good. Sad I wasn't born 5 years earlier. So many good older games that were before ps3 era that I'll likely never get to play
I feel like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was the best stealth game. It sight and hearing was so important back then. Not just hiding behind walls, you had to use the shadows to move around. Interrogating was also fun back then.
@GG22n no it's not, too many gimmicks with all the predator shit or whatever (forgot what it was called but they had like different non stealth playstyles or something) Chaos theory was just pure splinter cell at its best.
Hitman proves stealth can be done well. Also dishonored and deus ex. Hitman is the golden standard, though! Hitmans reward is when you finally get your target cleanly, in one of tons of ways, few obvious ones❤
My favorite stealth game, one I even go back to replay every couple of years, is Mark of the Ninja. While the game is fairly linear, the various armors the game provides almost act like slightly different gamemodes that vary from full non-combat stealth to having fewer tools but can teleport to making your kills and the bodies you throw at people actually terrify guards into panicing and causing chain reactions of friendly fire. The tight-knit levels that still offer a ton of different paths and gameplay styles is just such a blast, and I just really wish there'd be more games like it in the market. Edit: My bad, I made this before watching the full thing, he does mention Mark of the Ninja. Sweet.
if you like mark of the ninja id reccomend RONIN its somewhat similar. and can be just as fun if you like action or turn based(the game only gets turned turn based if your cought)
it's weird for me to hear praise for Mark of the Ninja: to me, the game is unplayable because of the character's completely nonsensical refusal to use modern tech (ninja were actually very technophilic historically), and the fact that all the guards are blind unless you're under a spotlight
@@slkjvlkfsvnlsdfhgdght5447 I mean, last I checked (a few months ago), the game has literal supernatural powers in it, so I don't get why you expect historical accuracy from it. As far as the sightlines, basically every single level environment is either dark as heck or light up by lights that you can destroy. Most of the guards you face (especially early on) are low alert where they just kind of decide not to use their flashlights so they don't have that much of a sightline. When they are actually on alert and use their flashlights or you are directly in the light then they spot you very easily. While there are certainly much harder stealth games than it, MotN is on the less forgiving side of alert than most games, so I really don't know what you mean by that, or how either of these makes the game "unplayable" for you.
Yeah, that's actually the only Stealth Game since Thief that I liked. The 2d perspective probably helped it to not suck. On the contrary, Mark of the Ninja was awesome! ...aaaand he promptly mentioned 2d. My bad :D
Honestly didn’t think about it like this until this video, but tbh considering one of the biggest driving plot points of Ghost of Tsushima is that you’ve began to dishonor your entire life’s code by attacking in stealth instead of head-on, you’d think there would be more fleshing out of the stealth ability and skill tree. There was some great mechanics to it, but it wasn’t as hard of a drive for it as you’d think. I still love the game to death but you made me think about this just now
100% agree, I love GTFO so much. And while I might be blinded by my love for the game, I do really like that it doesn't use visuals but instead plays on its own specific stealth mechanic. The fact it isn't easy and very punishing to mess up when you do, while still being recoverable is a massive for me. And lastly the fact that you have control over when you want to stealth versus not -- typically you will want to stealth but it allows a bit more strategy and planning when you go through a level (if you can afford stealthing or not).
I'm not against funcional action combat if stealth fails, but the stealth does need to be the deeper part, even way back on the PS1, tenchu gave you a lot of options including a grapple hook that attached to any house just fine, spikes to throw behind you while running away, a bamboo straw to hide underwater, etc. While modern stealth often you can only grapple to the designated grapple point, and items are just variations of bombs. And if all else fails, Tenchu had a good, hard combat that felt like a modern soulslike being very lethal.
One of the reasons that stealth is games these days sucks so much is because these games sprinkle in mechanics for all sorts of genres and execute them poorly on average because they are trying to mix everything. Games like Ghost of Sushima or most Ubisoft games these days don't have a single genre label so they are not very focused. So really the reason that stealth sucks is because of the death of video game genres. We're only going to get a true stealth game like Styx Master of Shadows only once and a blue moon as these major companies won't make many games that don't seek to please as many people as possible. Luckily we have some good products coming out in middle market development who understand that making focused genre games is appealing to players and will attract an audience.
I like how early Splinter Cell made you ‘fight stealthily’ by blowing up bombs set earlier while running or jumping on them. It was goofy but I see the potential in ‘fighting stealthily’ since no one has ACTUALLY done it before. The splinter cell example was just an accidental result from how physics worked in that world. Jumping on someone from a higher ground knocks them out regardless. It’s just how physics worked. True ‘stealth fighting’ would be running around while killing anyone who was off-guard.
I didn’t watch the whole video yet but the moment I saw sly cooper 2, which was the first game I ever played at 3,5 years old and imprinted in me the stealth mechanics that I searched in every game I played growing up, I knew it was gonna be a really educational video. Props to u man
Tbh loud stealth should be more of a thing in games stealth where you use distractions and fast movement to not be spotted and all that waiting for an opening does is get you discovered
3:45 I agree with most of these games being "the plain doughnut" of stealth, but the last of us 2 doesn't deserve to be part of that category. It has one of the best, most well refined stealth systems I have ever played, with intelligent AI, creative level design, and very well polished gameplay that make it so much fun to play.
One of the biggest drawbacks of stealth in action games is that if you're good enough at fighting, being sneaky is just making an enemy that takes one second to die loudly die quietly in a minute instead. It's jarring to play games where you have a good ability to kill shit loudly and it offers you stealth, because if going loud isn't challenging enough to justify stealth, you just aren't incentivized to do it, which is where Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint come in: I haven't personally done it in Wildlands and don't even know if it's possible, but Breakpoint allows you to tweak a lot of the game, including removing enemy markers from your screen and the minimap, which makes you rely on memory and sound cues to find enemies, since even if you fly the entire base with a drone, no markers means you won't wallhack them (oh nooo). Wildlands, on the other hand, had a wanted system that started causing hellfire if you decided 4 people could fight a whole-ass government army, and they've been some of the most fun open world experiences I had in recent memory because they're fairly gadgety and open about how to do stuff. Hell, one of my first infiltrations in Breakpoint was grabbing a vehicle, parking at a tall wall and using the vehicle to climb a place I otherwise couldn't.
A strangely obvious but still very effective strategy to increase immersion and also the stealth experience in many games is turning off the hud or at least turning off as much that's not "necessary". You will make almost any game harder (if it isn't already created with that vision in mind) which is probably also the reason why most people don't use that option in games but i think it can create a big difference. Your vision and the games sound design become a lot more important and the tendency to rush into any stealth scenario without fully knowing what's waiting for you creates a far more unpredictable but also more satisfying stealth experience even though the systems might be barebones. It's in general a great way to experience a game "more naturally" so it doesn't get too predictable and calculated to create a experience that challenges your knowledge of games and forces you to adapt.
@@lucasLSD That ability really isn't that good. You can't see far and they are lit up as a hard to pinpoint blur that only shows up as you hold the button. It doesn't tell you what type of enemy it is either. It's only use is knowing something is in that general direction. The average mini map and HUD display is more useful.
Stealth is highly situation specific. The more options you have to solve a problem, the more organic and improvisational the gameplay becomes. Can you shut down the power? Shoot out cameras? Jam the communications? Destroy the enemies vehicles in advance? Create a huge distraction on the other side of the map that requires half the base to investigate? It's all about specificity and situational puzzle solving. These are the things that stick with me with regards to effective stealth gaming.
I like the idea of stealth because it sounds cool - you move like a shadow, like a ghost, you are invisible to most, nothing can stop you on the way to your target, or you are a silent butcher cutting down enemies before they even realize what happened leaving behind only the question "what kind of monster could do this?" for those who find the bodies in the morning. But in reality it turns out that stealth in games is incredibly stupid or boring. And if before stealth games were essentially puzzle games, but now they are often just very boring games where you just have to sit for 15 minutes and wait until the characters start moving from one place to another again and if you are noticed then the mission is failed, start over or now you have to fight a whole army.
@@a.c.slater7989i mean... a lot of people are praising thief... which is exactly what was just described... you wait for a long ass time for an enemy to go away or to turn their back. And if you get seen you are done anyway so yeah. Full stealth games have that exact issue
@@sebastiangabaldon4090 They're definitely great in Terms of Atmosphere and I just love the Way how they utilize Shadows and Darkness. Especially in the first One. But they just can't reach the Creative Versatility, that "Hitman: "World of Assassination" has to offer to the Player. On my Top List, Splinter Cell is sitting on the 2nd Rank tho, right behind Hitman.
@@sebastiangabaldon4090 yea no, splinter cell's had great stealth Aesthetics, but they don't even come close to, say, playing (some of the) Hitman games without changing a suit or killing anyone (except target)
One of the advantages Batman Arkham stealth has over other games is you are not forced to stay in one position while you hide and wait for you enemy to get into position. You have the verticality of the perches to swing between and vents in the floor you can enter allowing you to tackle the stealth section from any starting point. Compare this to other stealth interactions in games which is usually you waiting for an opportunity to move which is simply boring gameplay. Stealth games need to give the player the ability to move around a level so they can better understand the map layout and create opportunities to take out enemies in a seemingly endless variety of takedowns. In batman a single guy standing next to a ledge can be takendown from the ledge, from behind, moved to take down from a perch, with explosive gel, overloading their weapon and shocking them into firing, hacking a drone to shock them, and countless orherways to fuck with this one guy. And every enemy has that many options for how you take them out with an average of 6 enemies in an encounter.
Literally one of the best videos talking about video games that i've seen in a while. Giving a psychological demonstration of why may stealth genre be, by nature, not so engaging is so smart. Although i can stand you dont putting scenes of skyrim nor talking about it at least once lol
Dishonored 1 & 2 are brilliant action stealth games, where you can play it all run and gun and take everyone out, or slip into stealth at anytime and back out, that and TLOU 2, games like that for me are brilliant, great video! 😃
At 4:45, you describe modern stealth games and how they are immensely forgiving to their own detriment. I honestly think you have described pretty much all mainstream video games of the past decade plus with few exceptions.
fun fact: Mark of the Ninja featured much more in depth combat in its development stage, with different attacks and stuff. but when playtesting it showed that no one used stealth, they simplified it in order to draw more attention to the mechanics you should actually use
I got a really good stealth experience in an unexpected game, Shekiro. The game not beeing 100% stealth made that the enemies didn't have to act like stealh game enemies so they felt more organic, you didn't really have stealth tools, but the map design (i think regularly in the rooftops of the high temples) and the movement with the hook where so satisfying that just moving was cool. But the most important was that the combat was so punishing that each less enemy in your way felt like a small win, going undetected wasn't the objective, but one less enemy might be a massive change in dificulty
In AC Revelations there's a quest giver inside restricted territory. Then the cutscene Ezio showed up behind the quest giver all cool like. It think that's one of great way to show how cool stealth character is.
I picked up Hitman 2 for the first time and it was amazing. I loved trying different things, the constant tension of possibly walking into the wrong area, and trading the controller off with my GF who would try a completely different tactic and leave me going "i never thought of that!" To me, stealth is a mix of a puzzle and platformer, rather than action. And when the puzzle has multiple solutions, it feels expressive and gratifying.
I like the idea of "popcorn stealth", it's a nice catch-all for modern game design where stealth is one aspect of a cohesive experience and not especially deep. There's no doubt that the genre has burrowed deep into the indie sector in recent years. Games are hard to make; big games are very hard to make, so it follows that the expenses and need for solid sales figures play a huge role in what gets made and who it's marketed towards. At the same time, the genre has evolved and independent devs have served up some absolute gems over the years.
The gold star segment made me think, what about a stealth game with the prince of persia sands of time rewind mechanic? If you're seen you lose, but you can rewind time a few seconds to do that part better. The "time sand" becomes your health. Narratively, the enemies never saw you in your timeline. They don't need to be dumbed down in case of alert, as they are in fact very capable of finding and killing you when you mess up
games have become too much expensive, companies try to buy audience with pretty graphics and then it's no longer viable to make a genre focused game, as a result the games loses personality and stealth is usually left as a tree path to focus, like ghost of tsushima allowing you to use levelups as skill points Also stealth becomes a "cheese mechanic" very quick on action games, getting the classic tall grass to remember people that stealth exists, but you end up with some form of exploit(I still recall beating any Shadow of the Tomb raiders areas piling corpses around a bush) I'd not say that the instant gratification is a problem but the punishment being story wise, dishonored had the issue of punishing high chaos but somewhat forcing most players into it unless they save scum, the entire world around you gets worse with low honor while it leaves pure stealth as more of a perfectionist thing which is frustrating. If you're playing something like lies of P, a souls like, just get back to where you died, you get your ergo back and done. Arkane did fix the system on the second game allowing non lethal combat which is awesome, specially with the more complex skill tree I don't think stealth sucks, the thing is that those games are using it as a feature not a genre making it feel dead
I was a ranger in the finnish defence forces during my service, and I spend way too much time thinking about how and why stealth in games is really weird and if and how it could be better - so I'm excited for this video before even getting past the intro 😊
I don't over sale Tenchu but it had a good stealth mechanic. So instead an x-ray hearing vision, you got a Ki or Chi meter to sense a danger and it's realistic because if you're in enemy territory or in dangerous place you'll become more aware with your surrounding
The most realistic representation of stealth in gaming I've ever experienced, surprisingly, was in assassin's creed. The first one. It literally makes stealth extremely difficult unless you are patient and strike with precision. Despite it being an old game and slightly outdated, the stealth in it holds up very well. Not enough people give it credit. If you get too close to an enemy, move too quickly, or act suspicious, you alert literally everyone. The amount of times I've died to Templar soldiers because i got spotted just from accidentally bumping into them is rather hilarious.
I love how hitman does stealth,you can blend in,completley sneak around or go guns blazing and its very fun when stealth fails and you need to improvise
uncharted 4 and lost legacy have suprisingly good stealth, that blend in correctly with the movement and parkour mechanics besides ghost stealth (not killing anyone) is narratively supported by the plot, as a lot of scenarios that start in stealth can be passed without having to clear an entire area (two trophies are about going through two areas fully ghost style), you can jump over enemies and take them down that way, from under, and in multiple quick ways, it feels frenetic, even if it is stealth also if you enter combat and hide for a while , stealth is resumed, in a search kind of mode, Grenades don't make them instantly spot you, but it can trigger reinforcement scripts if the enemies know you are somewhere i completed multiple playthroughs in stealth because I found it fun by what it is
Great job as always! I do think you missed out on one genre where stealth can still be an integral part of the experience, and that's horror. In that genre (or theme?), slow paced stealth and instant (often horrific) fail states add tension and stakes that really work with the game's main appeal. I'm thinking stuff like Alien Isolation and the early stages of RE7, but I know there are other examples. Good luck with the second channel! Gonna check it out now.
Aragami 1 was a very good stealth game, being spotted isn't an automatic failure but with how combat works, it might as well be, you lose points for being spotted or if bodies are discovered and the game rewards you with cool skins for killing everyone on every stage, not killing anyone, never raising suspicious/being seen and by defeating the game on higher difficulties. A good stealth game where play with the shadows is your best friend.
Shadow of the Erdtree was the best stealth experience I've had in couple of years. Yes it was a fairly barebones mechanic, but the difficulty of most enemies was turned up high enough and the enemy placement was spaced out enough that using stealth made clearing certain legacy dungeons an absolute pleasure.
the newer ghost recons had so much potential, ima tom clancy fanatic and i couldn’t understand how people absolutely hated the 3rd person aspect, but they did absolutely flop on breakpoint, it was only better than wildlands because of the more realistic looking animations the camera and your character don’t feel as stiff…
Unfortunately it’s just a shitty mgs5. It has interesting mechanics and ideas, but the execution is poor. If it was much more refined and mechanically sound, it would be so so good. But every time I go back to it all I can think is “I could just be playing Phantom Pain right now”
@@GBelmont87 it’s def good to me cause i automatically like every tom clancy title i got over 2k hours between the divisions and another 1k between the ghost recons, the story is better, but the animations of the character and the camera make it feel very robotic, i make no hud videos on breakpoint because it looks smoother visually, but as far as the story goes for a play through, wildlands all day👍🏻
The Thief reboot... The original Thief trilogy (even though they're 3 significantly different games), the Splinter Cell trilogy, and Styx (to a lesser extent) hold up very well. I would say Hitman has gone the modern route of stealth; so, it's odd that you included it as if it's on the level of Thief Gold. Regarding slowness being a prerequisite, Payday 2 is one of the better stealth experiences, and that's because it can be fast-paced. It's kind of humorous that you show Thief (reboot) when talking about "someone you didn't even know was there." That game has bad sound design compared to the original trilogy, and they replaced good sound with wallhacks, meaning you can "see where all of the sources of danger are." That ability to see the danger makes the game worse. It's odd that you didn't talk about audio design in a video titled "Why Stealth Sucks." That's the biggest flaw of modern stealth.
In order to make a stealth game that really works, you need to make running away and trying again more enjoyable than reloading a save. But most stealth games have a scoring system that punishes you with missing progress if you get spotted
I have no problem with save-scumming stealth games personally, since I enjoyed the Splinter Cells, Thiefs, and Dishonoreds and I save scummed through them all the time. Though escaping after an alert is certainly fun in MGS games where save scumming is less convenient due to a lack of quicksaves. Plus I feel like a stealth game that DOESN'T punish you for being caught defeats the point. It doesn't feel logical that you can just run away and it's all suddenly fine just because the guards somehow forget about you. I think the cold hard truth is that stealth games are for patient gamers. Those who don't understand delayed gratification just are not the target audience, period.
@@McCaroni_Sup I like the way intravenous does it, if you get out of sight quickly enough, the enemies go from combat mode to high alert, and don't leave high alert until they all die or you finish the mission.
@@McCaroni_Sup I think you missed the key point of my specifying punishment by taking away progress meaning "if you want to complete all the objectives you literally cannot even get grazed by someone's eyeball" which is exactly the type of stuff that leads you to quick saving and quick loading. When it's more fun to be able to get away if you're skilled enough and approach from a different angle. When the game makes the ACT of sneaking around the objective and not the ACTION of using stealth and subterfuge to complete a task or reach a location, it's ultimately less enjoyable and often times those games have less ways to approach the situation overall
What this video made me realise is there should be progression in stealth games. Overtime players can gain abilities as enemies get better like Disappearing bodies when enemies start patrolling around Replacing dead enemies (this can be upgraded from like a blowup doll to something that can speak and act normal) when patrols start checking each other Teleporting/super speed when target location gets really big and scouting is needed See through walls when enemy density starts rising and this could grow as players progress. Planting hidden bombs when patrols can’t be sneaked up on. Walking through walls when guards start guarding choke points properly. Laying traps to kill a few enemies and slow others them down when getting noticed during a mission becomes the norm. Get invisibility but make enemies be able to get rid of it so you have a few seconds of safety if you’re caught. Stealth games might also do better assuming that enemies know someone is around and act accordingly which does make stealth harder but at least it means failure is not so binary as long as players have more abilities to handle it. The player could be forced into not using just one strategy by making enemies adapt to it and so make it seem more like they’re a master, and be more engaging and less repetitive. The player could even take advantage of this for example running away a lot so enemies chase faster but this makes them less cautious so they don’t see traps as well and if players take advantage of this it’s feel so badass. Something I’m not sure of how to handle is introducing new enemies. With action enemies, you can encounter them, find out their perculeralites probably taking some damage and then figure out how to deal with them all in one mission without needing to restart and completely changing your plan. Actually maybe they can just be added in small numbers at first in a way that you don’t need to know how to deal with them to still win a mission.
I love playing cyberpunk 2077 stealth because there's so many ways you can sneak past or defeat enemies. Hack and bait enemies or kill them without ever stepping inside the enemies base , shoot from afar with stealth weapons, sneak behind enemies and hide the bodies. You can basically have stealth at your own pace whether it's slow or fast. Same thing with batman arkham knight
Exactly, cyberpunk does it amazingly, because it's never forced but rewards it equally as doing it guns blazing. I've never felt like either is better, i always got to choose (save for 1 mission where stealth skips a horrendous car chase)
YEARS ago I basically wrote an essay on this shit. The problem with stealth is "enter a new room, scope it out, watch guards, go to the other side of the room" It's just a very slow, predictable slog that kills excitement. Things like RNG on guards needs to be implemented. When the guard gets to a certain position a "dice roll" happens, if it's a nat 20, a unique thing happens, if not then it's a 19 or 20, then 18, 19 or 20 etc till it's a 100% chance Now unique thing could be takes a phone call and mindlessly walks around in circles, goes for a smoke, plays with his gun or sword, ties his shoe, slumps down and sits for a good 5 minutes ... even make it super easy and he goes into a nearby room or finds a bench and falls asleep. In terms of how this effects gameplay, if he's playing with his equipment, he wont be paying attention as much so you can be more reckless. On the phone means his vision is spinning round but he can't hear as well. If he's asleep, you can do what you want as long as it's not too loud etc etc etc
There are some cool new stealth games in the indie scene: Filcher - basically Thief in a 1930's mob setting Gloomwood - a mix of Thief and survival horror Thief Simulator - haven't tried it yet, but seems like a fun play on Thief as a modern low life burglar Party Hard - basically if Hitman's objective was to kill everyone in a level Intravenous 1+2 - a mix of Hotline Miami and tactical stealth
ok Arkham stealth absolutely SLAPPED, yeah it was in 2015, but i gotta stand up for how absolutely badass Arkham was, alright sure its not instant KO, but dont upgrade your armor and see how many slip ups you can afford even with smoke bombs and all that jazz, and not the mention the pure style and satisfaction you can get out of arkham? i mean cmon, sure its not the best in the world, but that shit will make you feel like batman definitely makes me sad tho, seeing how rad mgsV was close to being and seeing that potential stealth could have in a modern titles, could you imagine how realistic and satisfying we could get stealth with today's tech? honestly really excited for mgs3 for this exact reason, camo was the peak system, alotta stealth games have sort of half baked features, like shadows for examples, shadows are either useless, or make you completely invisible and just turn into a safe zone, mgsV fumbled really hard with its poor implementation of camo, we need a number like mgs3 had, but also have that number be effected by shadows more, the best part of stealth is barely not getting seen, just barely slipping by, its why my favorite memories come from pressing against a wall in mgs3 as a patrol of guards walk right past me, NOTHING makes you feel that stealth in todays games, not mgsv not dishonored (ok maybe dishonored, ive had some good moments with blink, but regardless)
@@Blaze72sH I remember my first time playing Arkham Asylum. Going through a stealth encounter and then seeing the enemies chain formation to be back to back to each other when they realised I was there and that sold me in the arkham games so much
Man I really loved Aragami 2 (never played the first one though i'll maybe try it) It allowed you to go loud, but it was so hard you almost couldn't really a hitman scenario. But it also didn't feel too slow due to your abilities teleport, while not making you a god by limiting it to shadows.
As a giant Aragami fan ( R.I.P Lince Works ), while I love both games, I have to admit, I definitely prefer the first one a bit, it’s such a treat if you like hardcore stealth games. To name a few of the reasons: 1. Going loud isn’t an option entirely. Enemy weapons are infused with light, and since your body is entirely made of shadows, guards _will_ one-shot you. 2. You have to be very methodical about your kills. For example, there is no way to pick up or move bodies, you need to unlock an ability in order to dissolve them completely. This means that before you unlock it, you have to be mindful of when and where you kill, so that either no one sees it, or it gives you enough time to get rid of other enemies. And when you do unlock it, you still have to be careful as dissolving bodies takes time, and you’re completely vulnerable during the process. 3. Traversal feels very fun. Unlike in A2, you can teleport to every shadow ( probably a good thing considering how fragile you are ), and can even create your own to teleport to. Shadows overall play a much more important role in A1 gameplay-wise, as your energy, which is needed for almost all skills, will not regenerate unless you’re currently in a shadow. 4. It’s a lot more immersive, at least in my opinion. There’s very minimal HUD elements ( mostly just showing you button prompts ), and the game sort of pulls a Dead Space by making your energy meter not part of the HUD, but part of your character ( displayed on the cape ). Overall, A2 is a lot more arcade-y than the first one, and if you prefer that, then that’s fine! But if you’re looking for a hardcore stealth game, I’d say A1 is absolutely worth checking out.
Intravenous 2 released a few months ago and is one of my favourite stealth games. It toes the lone between hardcore and straight forward, where the stealth mechanics are fun and allow you to set up epic gameplay moments, but if you get caught you can be punished really hard. But also the combat is super fun as well, so even if things go wrong youre probably still gonna have a good time
Last of us II on grounded is a pretty great stealth experience, it’s a completely different experience to playing on lower difficulties. Edit: also getting caught doesn’t feel like an instant fail state, sometimes getting caught can even help you as it makes enemies scatter a bit or move to different positions.
It’s very underrated in alot of its gameplay due to the story. I played on survivor and it gave me an incredible stealth experience that was rewarded through keeping ammo and such.
Great video! You make some really good points and it's awesome how much you've upgraded your editing. If you're open to a little feedback, it sounds like you have some sort of subtle high pass filter applied to your narration which gives ur mic a sorta cheaper sounding vibe compared to what you were doing before. Tiny bit distracting, but great video nonetheless
Whoops, literally applied my filter to the wrong audio track 🤦♂️ good catch haha. Appreciate you bringing it up, I think I can go in and fix it which is nice. Glad you enjoyed also!
Yes, horror games manage expectations successfully. Players have accepted their vulnerability before playing, which is where all the pain from stealth games come from. That's the power of framing. Mainstream stealth games fail in this regard by trying to appeal to action games players...
I played Bunker, and it was so boring. The same goes for Isolation. It's definitely not the same as Thief or Splinter Cell. It's an omniscient bot that chooses to leave you alone occasionally. I'm not allowed to move quickly until I'm near an enemy or sprint between shadows when the enemy turns around, and that makes it very boring. Those horror games are "do something, wait 5 minutes for the monster to leave, repeat."
Especially Reverse Monster Horror. It is criminal how short the Xenomorph campaign in AVP was. I replayed that crap 5 times and relished every moment. It was really disorienting at times, considering how fast you are combined with the ability to climb basically any surface, but I found the visibility mechanic to be pretty interesting. Snuffing out each light source, picking them off one by one as all they get is glimpses running past or a full look as they die. It made it a bit more interesting when I had a growing area of hiding space on the ceiling, letting me better observe the situation. I should probably stop, I'm gonna go into a rant. Carrion is a new certified obsession for me ✨ Unlike the Xenomorph, you can't hide out in the open, so you rely even more on the environment around you. At the point I'm at, I've got 2 different "forms" of sorts, connected to size/health. 1-5 hp is smaller and faster, being a more difficult target, but also grants more stealth oriented abilities. Said abilities also apply to puzzles, and luckily there are pools near a lot of them that can essentially hold extra hp and allow the smaller form abilities. 6-10 hp can be MUCH larger, and almost snake-like at times. The only ability I've unlocked for it so far is a sort of heavy attack, which once again is useful both in and out of combat. Generally you can't just go in with attacks, mostly with higher level enemies, so taking advantage of interactable objects is often a must. Grate covers are especially useful, since you can hide behind them and burst out when a target is close enough. Alternatively, you can also smash them into enemies to either stun or kill them. Okay I should really seriously shut up now. Apologies for the small wall of text, I'm a bit passionate...
The reason we have popcorn stealth is because so many people nowdays dont have the patience for stealth missions. Which is a valid reason cause they can be boring if they are too drawn out but can be very fun when designed right
It sucks especially when you look at the biggest stealth series as well. MGS? Turned into an action game and died. Splinter Cell? Turned into an action game and died. Assassin's Creed? Turned into an action game (not dead but pretty bad). Hitman? This one somehow never lost touch and is perfectly surviving untouched. Experts still can't explain because no one else cares to try and make another AAA stealth game. So while most of the big stealth series did die and disappear, it happened when they stopped being stealth games, and the only one that didn't stop being a stealth game is doing insanely well. Seems like the usual suspect is just investors who want to reach the "broader audience". I feel the idea of "Game is hard and too punishing which frustrates audience" doesn't work as a reason for why these games died off when one of the biggest genres out there right now is Soulslikes. And those don't even offer anything else but those aspects that are supposedly the reason why stealth games died where most stealth games at least have often a story or something such as that to enjoy other than the gameplay.
Sorry but MGS turning into an action game is nonsense. And then died? Which MGS turned into an action game? MGSV has more action, if you chose action but MGS never diluted its stealth. The splinter cell example has merit though and Ubisoft can just get lost.
Hitman is more of a puzzle stealth game, they treat stealth like solving a series of puzzle pieces that seemingly far apart yet can be use to perform a perfect execution. So I guess they add a complexity of NPC interaction with player, interaction with another NPC and NPC archetypes, making it less of a "literally wait until NPC do something" and more of a "Find a way to approach target A with minimum mess possible" Alternatively, you can screw the puzzle and just throwing a random objects you picking up on your way toward army of guards, it is a viable method as well albeit get significantly less points at the end of mission (Still, you must admit many will consider it's the fun that count)
Disagree about Assassin's Creed. That franchise always was shallow with stealth, relying on the equally shallow combat, like the 3rd act of AC1, the Ezio Trilogy and most of AC3 and AC4. And yeah, MG Survive is bad. Fortunately MGS is releasing Delta, which looks much more polished than the original MGS3. Every other stealth franchise is either Hitman or dead.
Stealth game requires patience, observation, time, planing... traits that modern gamers do not have. Other thing is stealth is a gimmick right now, even Elden Ring has stealth, Spider-man has stealth "section" for no fucking reason. It's annoying.
"Modern gamers", more like 996-job gamers who barely have time to play. Look, stealth needs to teach players to be patience and that is undeniable, but there's a reason popcorn stealth exists. This system exists as a response to respect the players time because honestly, I don't want to get stuck in a mission for 1 hour just because I offed aa man by a speaker rather than a jumping rope, especially when I only have more than 1 hour to play and my kids start calling his dad to wipe their asses after having a poop.
Most people write it off as bad because most games implement it very horribly or lazily where it isn't fun or engaging and does not feel rewarding whatsoever
I never knew its potential until I saw those stealth highlight channels. A lot are planned routines but they showed me the potential the mechanics of even games with "bad" stealth have.
Watching people get pissed at early splinter cell levels and I’m like…you’re going too fast! Slow down and pay attention. They would all say but that’s boring stealth sucks! While I would just bliss out taking 45 minutes to sneak through a level unseen and unheard.
TloU 2 had some sick stealth action sections, the AI felt unrelenting. They will hunt you down but man, running from cover to cover popping some heads in between, scrambling for any advantage feels so good. Stealth combat and movement in harmony and man tht game becom s untouchable. Like please naughty dog, can we have a full game like this without having to sit throught 15 hours of cutscenes
NEW CHANNEL- Video Essay Speedruns: ua-cam.com/channels/EohrTGj0KOSc40-py0xIAg.html
Link to the Discord- discord.gg/Gcx93UPZh7
What are your thoughts on Red Dead 2's stealth, a game that prioritizes firefights but also gives you pretty weak armor, has plenty of sections dedicated to stealth, multiple options for stealth, and has pretty competent AIs. Obviously Don't take my word as gospel, you should always do your own research.
Thief series and Tenchu Stealth Assassins did it best.
@@brokeandtired definitely
Wrong. You are all just impatient mouth breathes that are bad at stealth.
there are two things that makes a good game fun to play… the first is rewards… but focising on reward is a common mistake especially because reward doesn't even have to be actual rewards or actually rewarding. the second is features… whut can you do in game… most games tend to have generic features… which is why they aren't enjoyable excwpt when they are rewarding you. this i think is whats missing in stealth games… features. thi?gs like more abilities more unique abilities and more locations.
Too much stealth relies on waiting around for an opportunity to do something. And if you hesitate and miss that window, then you've got to wait even more.
If this is how you’re playing stealth you’re playing wrong.
Assassin‘s creed unity dishonored numerous other games allow for fast paced, stealth action that is like no other check it out
Look up stealth gamer br
@@taylorpennington8126 StealthGamerBr replays a game countless times to memorize enemy ai, pathing and timing for each level before making his videos. His gameplay does not reflect how a typical player would play a game. His gameplay is amazing, but it came from hundreds of hours of playtime and mastery.
Or you get spotted so you have to hide and wait for them to de-aggro before continuing
mgs V executed the stealth progression perfectly in my opinion, the more you do something, the more enemies will develop new tactics to defend against yours, such as if you are constantly sniping enemies and shooting them in the head, they will start wearing body armor and helmets, and if you keep infiltrating bases unseen, they will bring out flashlights and spotlights
That Kind Of Progression Is Why I Love The Batman Arkham Series Of Stealth. Especially Arkham Knight In This Department. The More Harder Predator Sections Feature Guys With Disruptors That Disable Detective Mode, Medics That Can Revive Downed Enemies And Electrify Them To Make Them Immune To Stealth Takedowns from Behind, Guys With Thermal Goggles And Guys With Mines That Make Using Gargoyles Harder, ETC. And That's Only The Enemy Types! Their Behavior Can Also Change To Adapt To Your Playstyle. Use Vents Too Much? Enemies Start Checking Vents. Gargoyles? Enemies Start Shooting Down Gargoyles. Sneaking Up Behind People? Enemies Start Looking Behind Them. Hell If You Use The Voice Synthesizer Too Much, They'll Straight Up Stop Listening To Their Commander! It Forces You To Change Your Strategy On The Fly To Adapt To The Situation And I Love It!
It's too bad that by the halfway point, you could buy upgrades and weapons that made stealth pretty much pointless unless you really wanted to be sneaky. Action-focused progression eventually overshadowed stealth progression. Even the scoring system rewarded fast action more than perfect stealth.
@@matman000000 that's half true, a fast clear time or no traces both guarantees S rank
this was a thing in splinter cell pandora tomorrow
MGSV kinda sucks in terms of stealth mechanics?
I think Last of Us on it’s grounded mode presents a very unique style of Guerilla Stealth. The game creates a scenario where both a straight gun fight and a typical “slowly crouch behind everyone” scenario don’t work well, so you’re incentivized to mix stealth and combat constantly while having to manually keep track of enemy positioning since they themselves can sneak around and flank you.
This exactly. Starting off as Ellie, I was very much used to crouch and approach from the first game only to have a WLF guy turn around randomly on me. I very quickly learned to switch my play style from pure stealth to literal hit and run. Sneak by who I can, set up traps for those in my way, shoot an enemy that's on the opposite side of my goal, and run like hell once the chaos starts.
Trepang is sorta like this too. With a lot more focus on hit and run.
That's my favorite kind of gameplay tbh. That's how I played Dishonored and far cry as well
I agree, my playthrough was horrible stealth was the only way I could play I had trouble finding ammo and when I did have it it'd go away in the forced combat sections before everyone was dead. I'd be forced to try and get to people even though they basically one shot me because I had no ammo in these sections. It was hell. But the stealth parts were genuinely good because I knew I needed to do it in order to do the forced combat later. But I liked the stealth in the last of us anyway, I actually hate when games force combat if there is a stealth option. I go from feeling like a ghost who can shit on people, to a walking gun, which I find a little annoying in games with a big incentive on stealth.
I will say however that when you break stealth in a stealth game it should be difficult to regain it, if I play a stealth game and break stealth I'd usually restart and try to perfect the level. I think that's the fun part, learning patterns and finding more efficient routes and other mechanics like how far a sound can be heard or how far you can be before you're spotted add into the mix. Granted, it's stressful, but I feel that's a good thing as a stealth game being spotted defeats the purpose of it.
makes uncharted 4 feel soo dissapointing, gameplay wise its a downgrade in every way from tlou
I dunno if you played the older Thief games but you didn’t just rely on sight to know where enemies are, you hear them too. And not through an x-ray vision feature called “hearing mode” but instead through the sound design; all the enemies have audible footsteps and will talk to themselves or roar frequently. I stop at every corner and door and listen for anyone on the other side in Thief 2. It feels much more immersive than marking enemies to me.
I think horror stealth games solve that gratification problem you were talking about. I’m sure people don’t feel rewarded when in the midst of sneaking pass the xenomporh in Alien Isolation or whatever the hell that thing in Amnesia: The Bunker is, but when they succeed they feel rewarded by being spared an encounter with the scary monster they’re afraid of. There's an upcoming stealth game based on the A Quiet Place films, I'm looking forward to it.
The Quiet Place is getting a game...no flipping way, that sounds like fun! 🤯💯😃
and the sound design was great with reverb that let you guess how big the next room was and how far a enemy was away. Love Thief 1 and 2 and Black Parade Mod that came out just the year.
Manhunt does this on Hardcore mode you have no mini map but they offten talk allot so you can hear them that way. Older stealth games had much smarter ways to do stealth.
He's a zoomer whos primary point of refernce for stealth games is modern asscreed and that weird isometric cowboy game, of course he hasn't played the old thief games.
holy yappatron.
Bold Claim for someone presently within stabbing distance
Nice arguement, unfortunately,
Sneak attack for 30.0X damage!
@@snorp6781 Plus orc rage for a total of 60X damage
@@justsomejerseydevilwithint460665× from the silent & deadly perk
reason: people don't have the patience for it
go play the 2 classic thief games and get filtered
Honestly the Deus Ex pfp makes so much sense here.
The word "filtered" is a bit weird. Because the point of where people start seeing something as a problem rather than a feature gets really blurred. Worst part is when they start to tolerate genuine problems and call it "filtering", Fromsoft haven't fixed their camera for eternity and they're going to get away with it because of their ride or die fans defending them.
@@weirdbro6597 True, but i genuinely believe that games like movies and other medias should focus on a certain public instead of trying making it appealing to everyone. Cuz' most of time that games or movies tries to appeals to every single person, it just comes out a boring mediocre work (Examples: most of Ubisoft games and Hollywood movies).
That's why many AAA games feels so soulless, cuz' the executives and "gamer" journalists don't f*cking care that video-games are a form of art too.
That's why I hate it when I would watch people play a stealth game😂 because waiting would make your life so much easier. You're purposely making it hard for yourself because you can't wait. And then they complain about it
Paint dry watcher opinion.
13:30 I think the Arkham games perfected the evolution of stealth sections, predator rooms in the beginning of each game are usually simple in design and have basic enemies with guns. But as you progress further and have more gadgets so do your enemies, they introduce brutes which can’t be taken out silently like normal, medics that can revive ko’d enemies, detective mode jammers that mess with your primary way of tracking enemies, detective mode locators so that you don’t rely on it too much and so on. Enemy AI also evolves and they start noticing your patterns of you took out their friends and react accordingly, like they start checking vantage points when you took out an enemy from above, the smoke you out of the vents and start to buddy up and place mines when you knock them out from behind, it’s fun to adapt to those scenarios and how to plan on the fly.
Also I feel like you dismissed the consequences of being seen In the Arkham games by saying you can simply reset, the enemies actively punish you if they see you grappling up to a vantage point or going through a grate and start to actively limit those options.
This was the comment I was looking for. Personally never seen a game with better stealth than the Arkham games.
It's not pure stealth.
They're stealth puzzles, set pieces, not genuine stealth. Which isn't to say they're not fun - they very much are, but they're not really what diehard stealth fans are after.
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The real problem is gamers. Too harsh on stealth and players are turned away because it's not fun. When stealth is forgiving, then hardcore gamers have a problem. So game devs typically lean towards the one that will earn them more fans and/or money. Basic stealth.
some games like Dishonored and mgs 5 solve this by letting you fight when detected
@@catpurrito5586 You could fight in Thief 1 too, but it was difficult (stealth game), while In Dishonored, very easy (not a stealth game).
@@tomigun5180 but mgs5 is still a stealth game
@@catpurrito5586 I left that out, because I have to admit, I never played any of those games. You may be right, I hope you are.
Something Watch Dogs did was escalation of violence. In Legion, if you’re attacking a base with stealth attacks and are caught, guards react with batons and melee combat. Failing the fight means arrest. If you shoot people, they shoot back - which can lead to the death of the given operator.
So you get less punishment for messing up the stealthy approach, and it has an interesting message for US cops.
In my opinion, the best way to make stealth as a mechanic work is by giving a "soft stealth" approach, meaning you rely more on remaining out of sight than out of mind. Forgiving stealth mechanics can work, but having enemies straight up forget that I just killed someone in front of them kills the immersion.
For instance, when I played Ghost of Tsushima, I focused more on remaining out of sight when clearing camps rather than trying to take everyone out with stealth. Opening a fight with an assassination, killing two more people, and then getting out of sight to confuse the enemies was much more fun and much less clunky than just stabbing everyone in the back.
I think the best way to describe it would be a "something's wrong, but I don't know what" type of stealth.
You mean Ghosting, in Thief hardcore "supreme ghost" rule requires the player to return all keys you stole, close doors you opened, not a single alert comment from guards and leave the scene of crime as the same state of your originally entered. That also means some loots cant be taken and have to substract from the total loot count of the level.
@@bushcrap2019Thief, but Garrett is a Gentleman Thief laced with the elements of the Phantom Thief.
Shadow of Mordor/War did that too. If you're out of sight of all enemies, you can do stealth attacks - but they'll keep searching for you once spotted basically indefinitely.
The end result is enemies feel exploitable, but not stupid, and you really are incentivized to mix stealth and combat however you want.
One of the coolest parts of Dishonored is that when you mess up stealth and go on a high chaos run, the game gets more infested with rats, there are more guards and those guards are more accurate. So the game is telling you, "hey, you CAN mess up and not do stealth and just kill everyone, but the entire game will get harder with each level and your allies will start to distrust you. Many modern games that have stealth just have it as a kinda quick way to go about killing enemies without having to fight them head on. And also, as a whole, pure stealth games have gone away because it's too niche, when the action adventure and open world landscape is just so massive right now.
Interesting that you like the chaos system. I've seen several people complain that it stops them from using the more violent powers. Personally I think it really ties into a major theme of the game- temptation of power. The Outsider gives you these powers asking if you'll give in to violence like the marked before or hold back. It's a great example of game mechanics meshing with story, but it seems some people can't get past combat=gameplay.
@@adams13245 As someone who loves Dishonored and stealth gameplay, I don't think the ludonarrative justification is enough for the sheer amount of tools that are useless on nonlethal runs. I think stuff like the sword combat and Shadow Kill is more than fun & strong enough for the plot's point to be made- The game didn't need abilities like Windblast to also be completely useless for stealthy runs. The problem is allieviated to a solid extent in D2 and it doesn't cause that ludonarrative point to suffer IMO. _(note: I also think the plot's point could've been stronger if the consequences and rewards for doing things like working with Granny Rags were more potent, max runes requiring a high chaos run would've been cool)_
PREY does a similar thing in a much more subtle way, and while I adore that game too, trying to play it like a stealth game is a total mess, so the _(much more mild)_ ludonarrative judgement feels misplaced in that game.
@@darthvaderreviews6926 Yeah Dishonored 1 definitely did not make playing nonlethal great. I wish they would have used an inventory system where you can store up to 20 darts but you can choose the dart type. I agree D2 was much better than D1 in terms of playstyle options. I'm surprised you didn't mention Death of the Outsider as having a good nonlethal playthrough options. I would argue that DotO was the best in the series in that respect. Hook mines, hyperbaric grenades, hagpearls, electrobolts, chloroform bottles, and the opium tincture give you a lot of options with how to play nonlethally. I also like your points about consequences and rewards. I wish DotO would allow you to go for a Flesh and Steel/no powers run, and I miss being able to save NPCs like in the previous games, but in terms of nonlethal options the game is really fantastic. It also makes nonlethal runs more fun than lethal because the hyperbaric grenade and hook mine ragdolls are hilarious.
I think an underrated pick from the last 10 years for stealth is watch dogs 2. Stealth is incentivised because enemies are actually powerful enough to kill you in just a few seconds. There's a lot of creative things you can do with the hacking to create chaos and distractions, there's also the possibility of doing "ghost" stealth in creative ways with the use of the gadgets, robots, and hacking. And the use of hacking an enemies phone and nearby objects to distract them eliminates the "waiting" phase many modern stealth games have that disincentivizes stealth for a lot of people.
Dude some of the most fun I had was just sitting in the corner and completing an objective without even stepping inside the building even ones. It felt amazing.
I totally forgot about watchdogs 1-2 those had the right amount of stealth related tools to help you do stealth the way you want to
Watch Dogs 2 is soooo much fun. IMHO they should've scrapped guns altogether and only given you nonlethal weapons like tasers and the paintball rifle, that's the best way to play the game and it makes way more sense for a bunch of cheeky hackers trying to take down the system.
@@matman000000 I half agree, I feel like it makes sense for them to have guns in the more serious parts of the game when you're killing gang members lol. But I also feel like the game could've done without that story beat
2 and legion were great about this, they really felt more like immersive sims with how open their missions were, I don't get why people hate legion that much when it's that but without the cringe "hello fellow kids" characters.
As someone who loves stealth games, I've found the best way for me to engage with the mechanics in games like Ghost of Tsushima is to just crank the difficulty up. When you feel like you sort of have to be sneaky because if you get seen you'll probably be killed, it feels like a more natural playstyle. If its just as easy, and far quicker, to just walk up and kill everyone then it doesn't feel like stealthbis needed. But if one or two alerted enemies can actually be dangerous then you'll take sneaking around more seriously.
Personally I also like the OG Splinter Cells approach of "Don't kill anyone for narrative reasons", and alerted enemies are much harder to take down non-lethally. But I appreciate that this just incentivises save-scumming.
If you’re playing the Arkham games on hard (the way the games were seemingly designed to be played on) then you absolutely cannot just brute force your way through stealth encounters by running away or trying to out-combat everyone each time you’re caught. Just 2-3 enemies concentrating you with guns will melt Batman and it still takes time to grapple up to a gargoyle or jump into a vent and even when you do get into a gargoyle/vent they’ll continue shooting at you until you get further away. In City-Knight the thugs will adapt if you keep using the same strategies over and over by destroying gargoyles, frequently checking over ledges, checking vents, disrupting detective vision, sporadically checking their back, and they’ll stop checking out player-caused noise makers if you use them too much. It’s not the most intricate stealth gameplay ever but it’s not just a brainless system with lobotomies for enemies and it does an excellent job at making you feel like Batman methodically picking off a room full of armed henchmen. (To see what a shitty version of Arkham stealth looks like check out Bioshock BaS pt2)
In short: the Arkham games are gas
Don't need a video, I already experienced the shitty stealth of Burial at Sea pt2😭😭
I don't think stealth sucks, it's just that most modern AAA titles just suck, and add stealth as a tack on like you were going over, which I agree with, but I just.. don't think it's fair to focus mostly on these games though as you said it's more of a afterthought. Problem is that stealth, like real stealth a long the lines of Dishonored, Arkham, Thief, Splinter Cell, Hitman, etc. Those games creates a lot of friction, thing is, players don't have a lot of patience and as you said attention spans are slimmer. Devs are just trying to create titles that can sell, which just resulted in a lot of these games not being present (ofc there's exceptions like Arkham and MGS being very successful and their reasons for not being made atm is very different from the others) but you get the point.
I dont think he ever makes the case that stealth sucks
@@austin0_bandit05damn. Guess the title of the vid doesnt exist
@@CHEESEpuff69 Its clearly hyperbole if you watch the video. The video is basically a critique on the shortcomings and pitfalls of designing stealth games and maybe how we can address those problems
ADHD killed stealth.
Cp2077 comes to mind
I like how stealth is done in the Thief games. No magical crouching, detection bars, just the light/dark manipulation and attention to the surfaces you step on.
It's both amazing and pathetic that Thief 1 and 2, games which are older than many of the people watching this video, managed to solve pretty much all these problems while running on hardware that was barely more powerful than a potato.
Rip thief 4. I played that when it released and I had fun but I don't remember it being very good. Sad I wasn't born 5 years earlier. So many good older games that were before ps3 era that I'll likely never get to play
@@MythicAce218 , Thief 4 isn't good, especially if you already played the first 3. It does have some great things in it, however.
The sound design was extremely important, and new games are neglecting that. Instead, they let you see through walls.
@@Go_Coup yea,that was my point. Why I said "rip theif 4"
I recently played Thief 4 and I would say it's a very solid game. I think it's overhated.
Big props for getting negative reinforcement correct. I feel like most people confuse it with (positive) punishment.
I feel like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was the best stealth game. It sight and hearing was so important back then. Not just hiding behind walls, you had to use the shadows to move around.
Interrogating was also fun back then.
Hate that I had to scroll this far to find someone who mentioned chaos theory.
@@dividedstatesofamerica2520 , it's an overrated game. It's still great, but it's overrated.
@@Go_Coupno it's not. Its literally peak splinter cell. No other game in the series, before or after, was as good...
@@zwenkwiel816 Blacklist is better 🙂
@GG22n no it's not, too many gimmicks with all the predator shit or whatever (forgot what it was called but they had like different non stealth playstyles or something)
Chaos theory was just pure splinter cell at its best.
Hitman proves stealth can be done well. Also dishonored and deus ex. Hitman is the golden standard, though! Hitmans reward is when you finally get your target cleanly, in one of tons of ways, few obvious ones❤
I would love to see Hitman mixed with Manhunt style brutal stealth take downs would make the perfect stealth game for me.
just my opinion but i hated deus ex stealth i much prefer to go guns blazing. never played dishonored though.
2:17 I'm afraid it's been... Nine years
insanely underrated comment
My favorite stealth game, one I even go back to replay every couple of years, is Mark of the Ninja. While the game is fairly linear, the various armors the game provides almost act like slightly different gamemodes that vary from full non-combat stealth to having fewer tools but can teleport to making your kills and the bodies you throw at people actually terrify guards into panicing and causing chain reactions of friendly fire. The tight-knit levels that still offer a ton of different paths and gameplay styles is just such a blast, and I just really wish there'd be more games like it in the market.
Edit: My bad, I made this before watching the full thing, he does mention Mark of the Ninja. Sweet.
if you like mark of the ninja id reccomend RONIN its somewhat similar. and can be just as fun if you like action or turn based(the game only gets turned turn based if your cought)
it's weird for me to hear praise for Mark of the Ninja: to me, the game is unplayable because of the character's completely nonsensical refusal to use modern tech (ninja were actually very technophilic historically), and the fact that all the guards are blind unless you're under a spotlight
@@slkjvlkfsvnlsdfhgdght5447 I mean, last I checked (a few months ago), the game has literal supernatural powers in it, so I don't get why you expect historical accuracy from it.
As far as the sightlines, basically every single level environment is either dark as heck or light up by lights that you can destroy. Most of the guards you face (especially early on) are low alert where they just kind of decide not to use their flashlights so they don't have that much of a sightline. When they are actually on alert and use their flashlights or you are directly in the light then they spot you very easily. While there are certainly much harder stealth games than it, MotN is on the less forgiving side of alert than most games, so I really don't know what you mean by that, or how either of these makes the game "unplayable" for you.
You gotta play tenchu z bro
Yeah, that's actually the only Stealth Game since Thief that I liked. The 2d perspective probably helped it to not suck. On the contrary, Mark of the Ninja was awesome!
...aaaand he promptly mentioned 2d. My bad :D
Honestly didn’t think about it like this until this video, but tbh considering one of the biggest driving plot points of Ghost of Tsushima is that you’ve began to dishonor your entire life’s code by attacking in stealth instead of head-on, you’d think there would be more fleshing out of the stealth ability and skill tree. There was some great mechanics to it, but it wasn’t as hard of a drive for it as you’d think. I still love the game to death but you made me think about this just now
GTFO is the best stealth experience ive played in recent years and most people debate its acual stealth status
I had to Google it to find out that GTFO is the full name of the game 😅
100% agree, I love GTFO so much. And while I might be blinded by my love for the game, I do really like that it doesn't use visuals but instead plays on its own specific stealth mechanic. The fact it isn't easy and very punishing to mess up when you do, while still being recoverable is a massive for me. And lastly the fact that you have control over when you want to stealth versus not -- typically you will want to stealth but it allows a bit more strategy and planning when you go through a level (if you can afford stealthing or not).
Stealth is fun, people that don't like it just have fried attention spans.
I'm not against funcional action combat if stealth fails, but the stealth does need to be the deeper part, even way back on the PS1, tenchu gave you a lot of options including a grapple hook that attached to any house just fine, spikes to throw behind you while running away, a bamboo straw to hide underwater, etc. While modern stealth often you can only grapple to the designated grapple point, and items are just variations of bombs.
And if all else fails, Tenchu had a good, hard combat that felt like a modern soulslike being very lethal.
One of the reasons that stealth is games these days sucks so much is because these games sprinkle in mechanics for all sorts of genres and execute them poorly on average because they are trying to mix everything. Games like Ghost of Sushima or most Ubisoft games these days don't have a single genre label so they are not very focused. So really the reason that stealth sucks is because of the death of video game genres. We're only going to get a true stealth game like Styx Master of Shadows only once and a blue moon as these major companies won't make many games that don't seek to please as many people as possible. Luckily we have some good products coming out in middle market development who understand that making focused genre games is appealing to players and will attract an audience.
I like how early Splinter Cell made you ‘fight stealthily’ by blowing up bombs set earlier while running or jumping on them. It was goofy but I see the potential in ‘fighting stealthily’ since no one has ACTUALLY done it before.
The splinter cell example was just an accidental result from how physics worked in that world. Jumping on someone from a higher ground knocks them out regardless. It’s just how physics worked.
True ‘stealth fighting’ would be running around while killing anyone who was off-guard.
I didn’t watch the whole video yet but the moment I saw sly cooper 2, which was the first game I ever played at 3,5 years old and imprinted in me the stealth mechanics that I searched in every game I played growing up, I knew it was gonna be a really educational video. Props to u man
Tbh loud stealth should be more of a thing in games stealth where you use distractions and fast movement to not be spotted and all that waiting for an opening does is get you discovered
3:45 I agree with most of these games being "the plain doughnut" of stealth, but the last of us 2 doesn't deserve to be part of that category. It has one of the best, most well refined stealth systems I have ever played, with intelligent AI, creative level design, and very well polished gameplay that make it so much fun to play.
*Dishonored 3 with the time traveling ability from A Crack In The Slab* 👌
One of the biggest drawbacks of stealth in action games is that if you're good enough at fighting, being sneaky is just making an enemy that takes one second to die loudly die quietly in a minute instead. It's jarring to play games where you have a good ability to kill shit loudly and it offers you stealth, because if going loud isn't challenging enough to justify stealth, you just aren't incentivized to do it, which is where Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint come in: I haven't personally done it in Wildlands and don't even know if it's possible, but Breakpoint allows you to tweak a lot of the game, including removing enemy markers from your screen and the minimap, which makes you rely on memory and sound cues to find enemies, since even if you fly the entire base with a drone, no markers means you won't wallhack them (oh nooo). Wildlands, on the other hand, had a wanted system that started causing hellfire if you decided 4 people could fight a whole-ass government army, and they've been some of the most fun open world experiences I had in recent memory because they're fairly gadgety and open about how to do stuff. Hell, one of my first infiltrations in Breakpoint was grabbing a vehicle, parking at a tall wall and using the vehicle to climb a place I otherwise couldn't.
A strangely obvious but still very effective strategy to increase immersion and also the stealth experience in many games is turning off the hud or at least turning off as much that's not "necessary". You will make almost any game harder (if it isn't already created with that vision in mind) which is probably also the reason why most people don't use that option in games but i think it can create a big difference. Your vision and the games sound design become a lot more important and the tendency to rush into any stealth scenario without fully knowing what's waiting for you creates a far more unpredictable but also more satisfying stealth experience even though the systems might be barebones. It's in general a great way to experience a game "more naturally" so it doesn't get too predictable and calculated to create a experience that challenges your knowledge of games and forces you to adapt.
@@Zy.Blurish Sure but I still want a visibility gem on my HUD. Everything else can go.
Another thing the last of us 2 did excellently
@@brandonclarke436 The game with the see through walls mechanic? lmao
@@lucasLSD That ability really isn't that good. You can't see far and they are lit up as a hard to pinpoint blur that only shows up as you hold the button. It doesn't tell you what type of enemy it is either. It's only use is knowing something is in that general direction. The average mini map and HUD display is more useful.
@@lucasLSD can easily be turned off if you dont like it, and the sound design in the game is good enough to still play it
Stealth is highly situation specific. The more options you have to solve a problem, the more organic and improvisational the gameplay becomes.
Can you shut down the power? Shoot out cameras? Jam the communications? Destroy the enemies vehicles in advance? Create a huge distraction on the other side of the map that requires half the base to investigate?
It's all about specificity and situational puzzle solving. These are the things that stick with me with regards to effective stealth gaming.
I like the idea of stealth because it sounds cool - you move like a shadow, like a ghost, you are invisible to most, nothing can stop you on the way to your target, or you are a silent butcher cutting down enemies before they even realize what happened leaving behind only the question "what kind of monster could do this?" for those who find the bodies in the morning. But in reality it turns out that stealth in games is incredibly stupid or boring. And if before stealth games were essentially puzzle games, but now they are often just very boring games where you just have to sit for 15 minutes and wait until the characters start moving from one place to another again and if you are noticed then the mission is failed, start over or now you have to fight a whole army.
Most of those games are action games with stealth sprinkled in.
@@a.c.slater7989i mean... a lot of people are praising thief... which is exactly what was just described... you wait for a long ass time for an enemy to go away or to turn their back. And if you get seen you are done anyway so yeah. Full stealth games have that exact issue
"Hitman: World of Assassination" is just the Goat of Stealth. Period.
No the old Splinter cell Games are the best
@@sebastiangabaldon4090 They're definitely great in Terms of Atmosphere and I just love the Way how they utilize Shadows and Darkness. Especially in the first One. But they just can't reach the Creative Versatility, that "Hitman: "World of Assassination" has to offer to the Player. On my Top List, Splinter Cell is sitting on the 2nd Rank tho, right behind Hitman.
@@sebastiangabaldon4090 yea no, splinter cell's had great stealth Aesthetics, but they don't even come close to, say, playing (some of the) Hitman games without changing a suit or killing anyone (except target)
agreed. I think the freelancer mode has got to be the best stealth game ever. No contest.
@@derchristianausffo Hitman is fun and all but Splinter Cell for me is way better
One of the advantages Batman Arkham stealth has over other games is you are not forced to stay in one position while you hide and wait for you enemy to get into position. You have the verticality of the perches to swing between and vents in the floor you can enter allowing you to tackle the stealth section from any starting point. Compare this to other stealth interactions in games which is usually you waiting for an opportunity to move which is simply boring gameplay. Stealth games need to give the player the ability to move around a level so they can better understand the map layout and create opportunities to take out enemies in a seemingly endless variety of takedowns. In batman a single guy standing next to a ledge can be takendown from the ledge, from behind, moved to take down from a perch, with explosive gel, overloading their weapon and shocking them into firing, hacking a drone to shock them, and countless orherways to fuck with this one guy. And every enemy has that many options for how you take them out with an average of 6 enemies in an encounter.
Anyone who likes Stealth games and Ninjas, should play "Tenchu Z". Its pretty much Assassins Creed Stealth, except if AC Stealth was good.
I love stealth games, fun af
Literally one of the best videos talking about video games that i've seen in a while. Giving a psychological demonstration of why may stealth genre be, by nature, not so engaging is so smart. Although i can stand you dont putting scenes of skyrim nor talking about it at least once lol
Dishonored 1 & 2 are brilliant action stealth games, where you can play it all run and gun and take everyone out, or slip into stealth at anytime and back out, that and TLOU 2, games like that for me are brilliant, great video! 😃
Facts, Dishonored series are criminally underrated
At 4:45, you describe modern stealth games and how they are immensely forgiving to their own detriment. I honestly think you have described pretty much all mainstream video games of the past decade plus with few exceptions.
fun fact: Mark of the Ninja featured much more in depth combat in its development stage, with different attacks and stuff. but when playtesting it showed that no one used stealth, they simplified it in order to draw more attention to the mechanics you should actually use
I got a really good stealth experience in an unexpected game, Shekiro. The game not beeing 100% stealth made that the enemies didn't have to act like stealh game enemies so they felt more organic, you didn't really have stealth tools, but the map design (i think regularly in the rooftops of the high temples) and the movement with the hook where so satisfying that just moving was cool. But the most important was that the combat was so punishing that each less enemy in your way felt like a small win, going undetected wasn't the objective, but one less enemy might be a massive change in dificulty
In AC Revelations there's a quest giver inside restricted territory. Then the cutscene Ezio showed up behind the quest giver all cool like. It think that's one of great way to show how cool stealth character is.
I picked up Hitman 2 for the first time and it was amazing. I loved trying different things, the constant tension of possibly walking into the wrong area, and trading the controller off with my GF who would try a completely different tactic and leave me going "i never thought of that!" To me, stealth is a mix of a puzzle and platformer, rather than action. And when the puzzle has multiple solutions, it feels expressive and gratifying.
1:50 uh oh, internet beef incoming
I like the idea of "popcorn stealth", it's a nice catch-all for modern game design where stealth is one aspect of a cohesive experience and not especially deep.
There's no doubt that the genre has burrowed deep into the indie sector in recent years. Games are hard to make; big games are very hard to make, so it follows that the expenses and need for solid sales figures play a huge role in what gets made and who it's marketed towards.
At the same time, the genre has evolved and independent devs have served up some absolute gems over the years.
FINALLY someone using ’negative reinforcement’ correctly
The gold star segment made me think, what about a stealth game with the prince of persia sands of time rewind mechanic? If you're seen you lose, but you can rewind time a few seconds to do that part better. The "time sand" becomes your health. Narratively, the enemies never saw you in your timeline. They don't need to be dumbed down in case of alert, as they are in fact very capable of finding and killing you when you mess up
If you get caught in arkham games and its NOT on purpose, youre playing the game wrong
games have become too much expensive, companies try to buy audience with pretty graphics and then it's no longer viable to make a genre focused game, as a result the games loses personality and stealth is usually left as a tree path to focus, like ghost of tsushima allowing you to use levelups as skill points
Also stealth becomes a "cheese mechanic" very quick on action games, getting the classic tall grass to remember people that stealth exists, but you end up with some form of exploit(I still recall beating any Shadow of the Tomb raiders areas piling corpses around a bush)
I'd not say that the instant gratification is a problem but the punishment being story wise, dishonored had the issue of punishing high chaos but somewhat forcing most players into it unless they save scum, the entire world around you gets worse with low honor while it leaves pure stealth as more of a perfectionist thing which is frustrating. If you're playing something like lies of P, a souls like, just get back to where you died, you get your ergo back and done. Arkane did fix the system on the second game allowing non lethal combat which is awesome, specially with the more complex skill tree
I don't think stealth sucks, the thing is that those games are using it as a feature not a genre making it feel dead
If devs wanted stealth to be more mainstream then the gameplay shouldn’t be “wait for an opportunity” but instead “CREATE an opportunity”
Those two exist in a lot of games.
I love stealth games, the way of playing without anyone seeing or even knowing your there just makes it so cool for me
You have some great video ideas!
I was a ranger in the finnish defence forces during my service, and I spend way too much time thinking about how and why stealth in games is really weird and if and how it could be better - so I'm excited for this video before even getting past the intro 😊
I don't over sale Tenchu but it had a good stealth mechanic. So instead an x-ray hearing vision, you got a Ki or Chi meter to sense a danger and it's realistic because if you're in enemy territory or in dangerous place you'll become more aware with your surrounding
Hear me out infiltrating the yiga base was terrifying and very difficult.
Nice to know people do see now, How most recents game have similar type of stealth mechanics.
Btw W editing on the vid.
Yeah sharp editing!
The most realistic representation of stealth in gaming I've ever experienced, surprisingly, was in assassin's creed. The first one. It literally makes stealth extremely difficult unless you are patient and strike with precision. Despite it being an old game and slightly outdated, the stealth in it holds up very well. Not enough people give it credit. If you get too close to an enemy, move too quickly, or act suspicious, you alert literally everyone. The amount of times I've died to Templar soldiers because i got spotted just from accidentally bumping into them is rather hilarious.
i hope "forever winter" will be a good turn on the stealth game genre
Same. Especially since the focus is on enemies trying to take out each other as opposed to you.
I love how hitman does stealth,you can blend in,completley sneak around or go guns blazing and its very fun when stealth fails and you need to improvise
uncharted 4 and lost legacy have suprisingly good stealth, that blend in correctly with the movement and parkour mechanics
besides ghost stealth (not killing anyone) is narratively supported by the plot, as a lot of scenarios that start in stealth can be passed without having to clear an entire area (two trophies are about going through two areas fully ghost style), you can jump over enemies and take them down that way, from under, and in multiple quick ways, it feels frenetic, even if it is stealth
also if you enter combat and hide for a while , stealth is resumed, in a search kind of mode, Grenades don't make them instantly spot you, but it can trigger reinforcement scripts if the enemies know you are somewhere
i completed multiple playthroughs in stealth because I found it fun by what it is
Asad, I really like your writing, delivery and editing... super polished man...I hope your channel grows appropriately.
you want good stealth + action level design? Try the mall mission in cyberpunk
Great job as always!
I do think you missed out on one genre where stealth can still be an integral part of the experience, and that's horror. In that genre (or theme?), slow paced stealth and instant (often horrific) fail states add tension and stakes that really work with the game's main appeal. I'm thinking stuff like Alien Isolation and the early stages of RE7, but I know there are other examples.
Good luck with the second channel! Gonna check it out now.
Aragami 1 was a very good stealth game, being spotted isn't an automatic failure but with how combat works, it might as well be, you lose points for being spotted or if bodies are discovered and the game rewards you with cool skins for killing everyone on every stage, not killing anyone, never raising suspicious/being seen and by defeating the game on higher difficulties. A good stealth game where play with the shadows is your best friend.
I love doing pacifist not seen runs in Aragami 1 only with basic abilities (create shadow/teleport and sound distraction)
Every tuber that talks about stealth games slept on Alien Isolation and I kind understand why but it's still be one of the best stealth designs ever
Shadow of the Erdtree was the best stealth experience I've had in couple of years. Yes it was a fairly barebones mechanic, but the difficulty of most enemies was turned up high enough and the enemy placement was spaced out enough that using stealth made clearing certain legacy dungeons an absolute pleasure.
9:31, OK man you got me
Great video, script and editing was top notch. Surprised to see you at 16.4k subs. You deserve a lot more!
the newer ghost recons had so much potential, ima tom clancy fanatic and i couldn’t understand how people absolutely hated the 3rd person aspect, but they did absolutely flop on breakpoint, it was only better than wildlands because of the more realistic looking animations the camera and your character don’t feel as stiff…
Unfortunately it’s just a shitty mgs5. It has interesting mechanics and ideas, but the execution is poor. If it was much more refined and mechanically sound, it would be so so good. But every time I go back to it all I can think is “I could just be playing Phantom Pain right now”
@@GBelmont87 what’s worse is the animations that keep it from being worse than wildlands were implemented later..💀
@@Dark._._. I haven’t played wildlands, should I? I’ve heard conflicting things and never wanted to buy all the dlc
@@GBelmont87 it’s def good to me cause i automatically like every tom clancy title i got over 2k hours between the divisions and another 1k between the ghost recons, the story is better, but the animations of the character and the camera make it feel very robotic, i make no hud videos on breakpoint because it looks smoother visually, but as far as the story goes for a play through, wildlands all day👍🏻
@@GBelmont87700h in wildlands and 450 in breakpoint. Yes, yes you should. Fantastic military open world stealth game
The Thief reboot... The original Thief trilogy (even though they're 3 significantly different games), the Splinter Cell trilogy, and Styx (to a lesser extent) hold up very well.
I would say Hitman has gone the modern route of stealth; so, it's odd that you included it as if it's on the level of Thief Gold.
Regarding slowness being a prerequisite, Payday 2 is one of the better stealth experiences, and that's because it can be fast-paced.
It's kind of humorous that you show Thief (reboot) when talking about "someone you didn't even know was there." That game has bad sound design compared to the original trilogy, and they replaced good sound with wallhacks, meaning you can "see where all of the sources of danger are." That ability to see the danger makes the game worse. It's odd that you didn't talk about audio design in a video titled "Why Stealth Sucks." That's the biggest flaw of modern stealth.
In order to make a stealth game that really works, you need to make running away and trying again more enjoyable than reloading a save. But most stealth games have a scoring system that punishes you with missing progress if you get spotted
I have no problem with save-scumming stealth games personally, since I enjoyed the Splinter Cells, Thiefs, and Dishonoreds and I save scummed through them all the time. Though escaping after an alert is certainly fun in MGS games where save scumming is less convenient due to a lack of quicksaves.
Plus I feel like a stealth game that DOESN'T punish you for being caught defeats the point. It doesn't feel logical that you can just run away and it's all suddenly fine just because the guards somehow forget about you. I think the cold hard truth is that stealth games are for patient gamers. Those who don't understand delayed gratification just are not the target audience, period.
@@McCaroni_Sup I like the way intravenous does it, if you get out of sight quickly enough, the enemies go from combat mode to high alert, and don't leave high alert until they all die or you finish the mission.
@@McCaroni_Sup I think you missed the key point of my specifying punishment by taking away progress meaning "if you want to complete all the objectives you literally cannot even get grazed by someone's eyeball" which is exactly the type of stuff that leads you to quick saving and quick loading. When it's more fun to be able to get away if you're skilled enough and approach from a different angle. When the game makes the ACT of sneaking around the objective and not the ACTION of using stealth and subterfuge to complete a task or reach a location, it's ultimately less enjoyable and often times those games have less ways to approach the situation overall
What this video made me realise is there should be progression in stealth games. Overtime players can gain abilities as enemies get better like
Disappearing bodies when enemies start patrolling around
Replacing dead enemies (this can be upgraded from like a blowup doll to something that can speak and act normal) when patrols start checking each other
Teleporting/super speed when target location gets really big and scouting is needed
See through walls when enemy density starts rising and this could grow as players progress.
Planting hidden bombs when patrols can’t be sneaked up on.
Walking through walls when guards start guarding choke points properly.
Laying traps to kill a few enemies and slow others them down when getting noticed during a mission becomes the norm.
Get invisibility but make enemies be able to get rid of it so you have a few seconds of safety if you’re caught.
Stealth games might also do better assuming that enemies know someone is around and act accordingly which does make stealth harder but at least it means failure is not so binary as long as players have more abilities to handle it.
The player could be forced into not using just one strategy by making enemies adapt to it and so make it seem more like they’re a master, and be more engaging and less repetitive. The player could even take advantage of this for example running away a lot so enemies chase faster but this makes them less cautious so they don’t see traps as well and if players take advantage of this it’s feel so badass.
Something I’m not sure of how to handle is introducing new enemies. With action enemies, you can encounter them, find out their perculeralites probably taking some damage and then figure out how to deal with them all in one mission without needing to restart and completely changing your plan.
Actually maybe they can just be added in small numbers at first in a way that you don’t need to know how to deal with them to still win a mission.
I love playing cyberpunk 2077 stealth because there's so many ways you can sneak past or defeat enemies. Hack and bait enemies or kill them without ever stepping inside the enemies base , shoot from afar with stealth weapons, sneak behind enemies and hide the bodies. You can basically have stealth at your own pace whether it's slow or fast. Same thing with batman arkham knight
Exactly, cyberpunk does it amazingly, because it's never forced but rewards it equally as doing it guns blazing.
I've never felt like either is better, i always got to choose (save for 1 mission where stealth skips a horrendous car chase)
I just like activating Sandevestian and going so fast they can't react.
YEARS ago I basically wrote an essay on this shit. The problem with stealth is "enter a new room, scope it out, watch guards, go to the other side of the room"
It's just a very slow, predictable slog that kills excitement. Things like RNG on guards needs to be implemented. When the guard gets to a certain position a "dice roll" happens, if it's a nat 20, a unique thing happens, if not then it's a 19 or 20, then 18, 19 or 20 etc till it's a 100% chance
Now unique thing could be takes a phone call and mindlessly walks around in circles, goes for a smoke, plays with his gun or sword, ties his shoe, slumps down and sits for a good 5 minutes ... even make it super easy and he goes into a nearby room or finds a bench and falls asleep. In terms of how this effects gameplay, if he's playing with his equipment, he wont be paying attention as much so you can be more reckless. On the phone means his vision is spinning round but he can't hear as well. If he's asleep, you can do what you want as long as it's not too loud etc etc etc
There are some cool new stealth games in the indie scene:
Filcher - basically Thief in a 1930's mob setting
Gloomwood - a mix of Thief and survival horror
Thief Simulator - haven't tried it yet, but seems like a fun play on Thief as a modern low life burglar
Party Hard - basically if Hitman's objective was to kill everyone in a level
Intravenous 1+2 - a mix of Hotline Miami and tactical stealth
Gloomwood is amazing.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy is another one especially if you like more pacifist Stealth games
You wanna know which stealth game was my favorite and I want back?
Tenchu series.
Man those were the times.
19:26 how ill feel if sly 5 ever gets talked about being made.
The last time i engaged with a stealth mechanic was BG3 because it can help set up a good ambush.
ok Arkham stealth absolutely SLAPPED, yeah it was in 2015, but i gotta stand up for how absolutely badass Arkham was, alright sure its not instant KO, but dont upgrade your armor and see how many slip ups you can afford even with smoke bombs and all that jazz, and not the mention the pure style and satisfaction you can get out of arkham? i mean cmon, sure its not the best in the world, but that shit will make you feel like batman
definitely makes me sad tho, seeing how rad mgsV was close to being and seeing that potential stealth could have in a modern titles, could you imagine how realistic and satisfying we could get stealth with today's tech? honestly really excited for mgs3 for this exact reason, camo was the peak system, alotta stealth games have sort of half baked features, like shadows for examples, shadows are either useless, or make you completely invisible and just turn into a safe zone, mgsV fumbled really hard with its poor implementation of camo, we need a number like mgs3 had, but also have that number be effected by shadows more, the best part of stealth is barely not getting seen, just barely slipping by, its why my favorite memories come from pressing against a wall in mgs3 as a patrol of guards walk right past me, NOTHING makes you feel that stealth in todays games, not mgsv not dishonored (ok maybe dishonored, ive had some good moments with blink, but regardless)
Arkham games were GOAT ❤
yeah, but the enemies are still brain-dead stupid
Arkham games are OP. Fantastic stealth.
@@slkjvlkfsvnlsdfhgdght5447 enemies in Arkham? They have one of the best AI.
@@Blaze72sH I remember my first time playing Arkham Asylum. Going through a stealth encounter and then seeing the enemies chain formation to be back to back to each other when they realised I was there and that sold me in the arkham games so much
Hitman and assassins creed have always been my favorite series. Stealth genre games are the best
Man I really loved Aragami 2 (never played the first one though i'll maybe try it) It allowed you to go loud, but it was so hard you almost couldn't really a hitman scenario. But it also didn't feel too slow due to your abilities teleport, while not making you a god by limiting it to shadows.
As a giant Aragami fan ( R.I.P Lince Works ), while I love both games, I have to admit, I definitely prefer the first one a bit, it’s such a treat if you like hardcore stealth games. To name a few of the reasons:
1. Going loud isn’t an option entirely. Enemy weapons are infused with light, and since your body is entirely made of shadows, guards _will_ one-shot you.
2. You have to be very methodical about your kills. For example, there is no way to pick up or move bodies, you need to unlock an ability in order to dissolve them completely. This means that before you unlock it, you have to be mindful of when and where you kill, so that either no one sees it, or it gives you enough time to get rid of other enemies. And when you do unlock it, you still have to be careful as dissolving bodies takes time, and you’re completely vulnerable during the process.
3. Traversal feels very fun. Unlike in A2, you can teleport to every shadow ( probably a good thing considering how fragile you are ), and can even create your own to teleport to. Shadows overall play a much more important role in A1 gameplay-wise, as your energy, which is needed for almost all skills, will not regenerate unless you’re currently in a shadow.
4. It’s a lot more immersive, at least in my opinion. There’s very minimal HUD elements ( mostly just showing you button prompts ), and the game sort of pulls a Dead Space by making your energy meter not part of the HUD, but part of your character ( displayed on the cape ).
Overall, A2 is a lot more arcade-y than the first one, and if you prefer that, then that’s fine! But if you’re looking for a hardcore stealth game, I’d say A1 is absolutely worth checking out.
Intravenous 2 released a few months ago and is one of my favourite stealth games. It toes the lone between hardcore and straight forward, where the stealth mechanics are fun and allow you to set up epic gameplay moments, but if you get caught you can be punished really hard.
But also the combat is super fun as well, so even if things go wrong youre probably still gonna have a good time
Last of us II on grounded is a pretty great stealth experience, it’s a completely different experience to playing on lower difficulties.
Edit: also getting caught doesn’t feel like an instant fail state, sometimes getting caught can even help you as it makes enemies scatter a bit or move to different positions.
It’s very underrated in alot of its gameplay due to the story. I played on survivor and it gave me an incredible stealth experience that was rewarded through keeping ammo and such.
I just want splintercell remastered
Great video! You make some really good points and it's awesome how much you've upgraded your editing.
If you're open to a little feedback, it sounds like you have some sort of subtle high pass filter applied to your narration which gives ur mic a sorta cheaper sounding vibe compared to what you were doing before. Tiny bit distracting, but great video nonetheless
Whoops, literally applied my filter to the wrong audio track 🤦♂️ good catch haha. Appreciate you bringing it up, I think I can go in and fix it which is nice. Glad you enjoyed also!
Damn, no way to edit the audio after the fact. Hopefully it wasn't too distracting!
Lethal stealth runs in Dishonored and MGSV are so stupidly fun and satisfying
I feel that the horror genre is the only safe haven for stealth in games. In horror games, stealth is alive and well.
Yes, horror games manage expectations successfully. Players have accepted their vulnerability before playing, which is where all the pain from stealth games come from. That's the power of framing. Mainstream stealth games fail in this regard by trying to appeal to action games players...
I played Bunker, and it was so boring. The same goes for Isolation. It's definitely not the same as Thief or Splinter Cell. It's an omniscient bot that chooses to leave you alone occasionally. I'm not allowed to move quickly until I'm near an enemy or sprint between shadows when the enemy turns around, and that makes it very boring. Those horror games are "do something, wait 5 minutes for the monster to leave, repeat."
Especially Reverse Monster Horror.
It is criminal how short the Xenomorph campaign in AVP was. I replayed that crap 5 times and relished every moment. It was really disorienting at times, considering how fast you are combined with the ability to climb basically any surface, but I found the visibility mechanic to be pretty interesting. Snuffing out each light source, picking them off one by one as all they get is glimpses running past or a full look as they die. It made it a bit more interesting when I had a growing area of hiding space on the ceiling, letting me better observe the situation. I should probably stop, I'm gonna go into a rant.
Carrion is a new certified obsession for me ✨ Unlike the Xenomorph, you can't hide out in the open, so you rely even more on the environment around you. At the point I'm at, I've got 2 different "forms" of sorts, connected to size/health. 1-5 hp is smaller and faster, being a more difficult target, but also grants more stealth oriented abilities. Said abilities also apply to puzzles, and luckily there are pools near a lot of them that can essentially hold extra hp and allow the smaller form abilities. 6-10 hp can be MUCH larger, and almost snake-like at times. The only ability I've unlocked for it so far is a sort of heavy attack, which once again is useful both in and out of combat. Generally you can't just go in with attacks, mostly with higher level enemies, so taking advantage of interactable objects is often a must. Grate covers are especially useful, since you can hide behind them and burst out when a target is close enough. Alternatively, you can also smash them into enemies to either stun or kill them.
Okay I should really seriously shut up now. Apologies for the small wall of text, I'm a bit passionate...
The reason we have popcorn stealth is because so many people nowdays dont have the patience for stealth missions. Which is a valid reason cause they can be boring if they are too drawn out but can be very fun when designed right
It sucks especially when you look at the biggest stealth series as well. MGS? Turned into an action game and died. Splinter Cell? Turned into an action game and died. Assassin's Creed? Turned into an action game (not dead but pretty bad). Hitman? This one somehow never lost touch and is perfectly surviving untouched. Experts still can't explain because no one else cares to try and make another AAA stealth game.
So while most of the big stealth series did die and disappear, it happened when they stopped being stealth games, and the only one that didn't stop being a stealth game is doing insanely well. Seems like the usual suspect is just investors who want to reach the "broader audience".
I feel the idea of "Game is hard and too punishing which frustrates audience" doesn't work as a reason for why these games died off when one of the biggest genres out there right now is Soulslikes. And those don't even offer anything else but those aspects that are supposedly the reason why stealth games died where most stealth games at least have often a story or something such as that to enjoy other than the gameplay.
Sorry but MGS turning into an action game is nonsense. And then died? Which MGS turned into an action game? MGSV has more action, if you chose action but MGS never diluted its stealth. The splinter cell example has merit though and Ubisoft can just get lost.
@@Herrrsus it seems that you, just like most of us, chose to forget about Metal Gear Survive
@shaunakdeshpande3837 that is true (what a disgrace of a game). Although im more convinced MG SOLID was up for discussion strictly
Hitman is more of a puzzle stealth game, they treat stealth like solving a series of puzzle pieces that seemingly far apart yet can be use to perform a perfect execution.
So I guess they add a complexity of NPC interaction with player, interaction with another NPC and NPC archetypes, making it less of a "literally wait until NPC do something" and more of a "Find a way to approach target A with minimum mess possible"
Alternatively, you can screw the puzzle and just throwing a random objects you picking up on your way toward army of guards, it is a viable method as well albeit get significantly less points at the end of mission (Still, you must admit many will consider it's the fun that count)
Disagree about Assassin's Creed. That franchise always was shallow with stealth, relying on the equally shallow combat, like the 3rd act of AC1, the Ezio Trilogy and most of AC3 and AC4. And yeah, MG Survive is bad. Fortunately MGS is releasing Delta, which looks much more polished than the original MGS3.
Every other stealth franchise is either Hitman or dead.
Thank you, Rakesh.
Stealth game requires patience, observation, time, planing... traits that modern gamers do not have. Other thing is stealth is a gimmick right now, even Elden Ring has stealth, Spider-man has stealth "section" for no fucking reason. It's annoying.
Spider-Man uses stealth in media quite a lot so they likely felt compelled to tack it on
"Modern gamers", more like 996-job gamers who barely have time to play. Look, stealth needs to teach players to be patience and that is undeniable, but there's a reason popcorn stealth exists. This system exists as a response to respect the players time because honestly, I don't want to get stuck in a mission for 1 hour just because I offed aa man by a speaker rather than a jumping rope, especially when I only have more than 1 hour to play and my kids start calling his dad to wipe their asses after having a poop.
All the dark souls game had a bit of stealth. It was aimed at pvp but pve it kinda works since the first game
@@ducvuminh8181it doesn’t exist to account for time its literally implemented because peoples attention spans are so shit now.
Honestly, best stealth in FS games was in Sekiro. If you charge in head first you get jumped by the whole gang
This is a very well-thought out essay 👍That pop corn stealth comparison is spot on.
I am convinced that if you dislike stealth you’re just bad at it.
Agreed
Exactly
Most people write it off as bad because most games implement it very horribly or lazily where it isn't fun or engaging and does not feel rewarding whatsoever
I never knew its potential until I saw those stealth highlight channels. A lot are planned routines but they showed me the potential the mechanics of even games with "bad" stealth have.
Watching people get pissed at early splinter cell levels and I’m like…you’re going too fast! Slow down and pay attention. They would all say but that’s boring stealth sucks! While I would just bliss out taking 45 minutes to sneak through a level unseen and unheard.
Thanks for mentioning Mark of the Ninja. It fucks to an extreme degree
TloU 2 had some sick stealth action sections, the AI felt unrelenting. They will hunt you down but man, running from cover to cover popping some heads in between, scrambling for any advantage feels so good. Stealth combat and movement in harmony and man tht game becom s untouchable. Like please naughty dog, can we have a full game like this without having to sit throught 15 hours of cutscenes
Grounded stealth is perfection.
You do make some valid points, but I still like/love and want stealth in games.