And then the Splinter Cell franchise shortly went off the rails, crashed and burned as soon as they decided that some of the most fundamental of those rules should just be abandoned, for the sake of basically more broad appeal via making the game easier.
Its honestly kind of shocking that someone has not just made an indie, more graphically simple version of some kind of melding of Splinter Cell and MGS core game mechanics, perhaps without the relatively costly voice acting and grandiose, superbly animated cutscenes.
Im waiting to live somewhere with an actual internet connection, and I am convinced I could put together a proof of concept build in UE 5 in 6 months, a comprehensive level.
Stealth Action games seem to be highly regarded and in great demand, but for some reason no one really makes them in 3d anymore, unless there are some hidden gems I’ve somehow not heard of.
PS: Assassins Creed doesnt count, the AI is braindead when it comes to stealth, takes turns attacking you… using modern terminology its just a 3d ARPG.
Dishonored encourages you to be stealthy. And i think the Thief series is all stealth, although i never got around to playing them. but yeah neither of those series have released a game in a long time.
True on both counts, I guess I should have qualified with ‘In the past 5 years’ or something.
I think Dishonored 2 came out in 2017? I did quite like those games.
And yeah, the Thief series arguably invented the stealth action genre in 3d, though I am fairly sure that MGS was basically the direct inspiration for Splinter Cell, can’t say I’ve heard any of those devs ever mention the Thief series.
Only other things I can think of are other immersive sims (which I /know/ the creators of the dishonored series would either say their game is or contains elements of), the better of which have pretty good sneaking missions and are highly similar to stealth action games in many ways, you could even say that stealth action games are basically streamlined immersive sims… not many of those get made or become popular though, SS2 remake being the only recent exception I can think of.
Finally, there is Alien Isolation, which … is sort of a stealth action game, but also a horror game. But again, that was quite a while ago.
I think, what is fundamental about splinter cell, the most important mechanic is the management of light and darkness. Which is less prevalent in other games.
It’s the only game I remember playing that has you dial in your movement speed with the scroll wheel to manage sound. It was really weird at first, but I got used to it after the first level. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember if this started in chaos theory or the first game.
I believe it is in the first game on PC, and yeah I thought this was/is a very good way to handle variable movement speed with a M+KB set up.
On a controller with a thumb stick, you can vary the degree to which you push it in a direction, unlike the 1 or 0 state of a key being pressed.
I am still surprised more games did not at least allow for this kind of control on PC, IIRC it was only even a thing with some earlier tactical shooters.
They both bring their own ideas, but the modern hitmans and sniper elite are both big 3D games built around stealth as a core part of the gameplay loop.
Sniper elite leans into the sniper part as the primary gun (you can get a lower power lower range higher bullet drop silenced version, or you can gun and move before they triangulate you, or you can use other loud sources of sound to avoid triggering alerts), but you can do most to all of it with a pistol and knife if you want.
Hitman does the costume thing, but every level is designed with the intent of a “no extra kill, no alerts, no bodies found, suit only” challenge being possible.
In both cases the enemy AI (what makes a stealth game IMO) has a nice level of reaction to sounds/things they see, without just categorically abandoning their post to chase shadows, and once clearly sighted enemies can really swarm and escape gets super messy.
The most recent Hitman games are best in class. Three games worth of levels, rogue-like mode to string them together randomly with random objectives if doing the story again isn’t your thing.
I’m excited to see what IO does with the James Bond franchise too. Even if it’s just a reskinned Hitman, it’d be worth it.
I like the gunplay of Sniper Elite better, but I’m a big stealth fan and they’re both fantastic stealth engines. I’d love to put MGS5 in that same category because I think the engine is there, but the actual world just never got filled in. After Ground Zeroes the scales of the bases in the main game just felt like a disappointment most of the time.
Enemies taking turns attacking you has been used in a huge variety of games in order to make the game feel fair or balanced to the player. Otherwise you end up with situations where the player gets stun locked in an animation or one shot killed, unable to engage in the combat at all, and many people do not find that fun and call it artificial difficulty. This can happen in any game, but is visible in games like Monster Hunter or Dark Souls where the player is attacked by multiple enemies at once.
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Sure, ok. A huge part of stealth action games is precisely that if you fuck up, you can very easily be overwhelmed, and only with usually a combo of significant skill and luck can you recover from this. Generally speaking, the idea of a stealth action game is that you are nearly guaranteed to be fucked should a full alarm be raised.
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You are describing two ARPGs as examples, further lending credence to my assertion that AC is faaaar closer to an ARPG than any kind of stealth game.
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Personally, I call games that set up queued attack sequences against the player artificially easy, an obvious power fantasy for casuals. There are games that are very melee centric that do not do this (Kenshi w/ attack slot mods, Sifu, Mount and Blade, etc.) which are generally significantly more difficult so long as you don’t cheese them.
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Oh right, I’m fairly certain you are just wrong when it comes to Dark Souls. One huge reason why at least the original was seen as so hard is that the enemies do not queue up to attack you following some kind of group rules, they’ll all go by their own individual AI, not waiting to take their turns.
His examples were games that demonstrate what being stunlocked and killed before you can react look like, and why some people think they’re “too hard”.
I agree with your premise that AC style generally not what I want to play. Though Shadow of Mordor does that format well enough that the combat in a true alert is more or less just to buy time to get the f out, because they swarm like crazy and you’d have to kill a hundred plus enemies to “win” outright at points. Taking on captains is about hitting hard and fast, triggering events that limit the number around, or at minimum disabling the alarm systems so the crowd doesn’t get too big. But overall I prefer to be punished hard.
There’s a multiplayer stealth game called Intruder that I think uses some of those mechanics. I know it’s all stealth-based and you have all kinds of gadgets and tools, like cameras and banana peels for people to slip on. You can crawl through vents, most of the guns are silenced, and you can communicate with your team via snaps.
I have played Intruder off and on since its initial alpha, and while it does have some very interesting ideas, (i believe there is a whole mechanic that makes you less balanced and more liable to ragdoll and fallover based off of your movement speed, turning speed and narrowness of what you are standing on, ie a railing vs the floor) it is fundamentally a multiplayer, round based team deathmatch game, whereas SC and MGS are single player.
Does any one actually play it any more? Last time I checked there were maybe 50 players, max, online at any given time.
It’s not quite “full 3D” but Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 can certainly scratch that stealth itch. They have clear consistent rules that utilize traditional stealth mechanics like vision cones and sound radiuses but improve on it by having a squad with multiple different skills and abilities that allow you to plan and execute elaborate takedowns with the press of a button. The best part is they usually go on sale for dirt cheap, especially now.
Metal Gear Solid and “clear rules” are not synonymous.
MGS is the game where you cure the effects of poison by spinning your character in the menu screen until they throw up, plug your controller into the second port to prevent mind control, and take a week long break from the game to kill a character via old age.