this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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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.
Yea but the PC version is botched because holding W and A or W and D together (to go in a diagonal) will not normalize the movement vector so you'll be faster when going in a diagonal and you'll step over the sound threshold. Still can't believe QA didn't catch this
Hah, I didn't notice that, was a long time ago.
I know that sort of thing often happens in ... well just many games, period. It used to be a sign of a less than stellar PC port, or back in the day when mod teams became full game devs, but it is still a persistent problem.
That and timing some things along with the framerate and others not.
Its wild that these kind of things that are basically novice game dev mistakes are still being made by novices and huge studios alike.
Styx does this, to an extent at least.
I like a little more combat than it offers, so I haven't truly spent enough time on them to comment on the quality as pure stealth, but figured I'd mention it anyways.
Agreed, that really set it apart. A few modern games at least claim to use similar systems for enemy awareness, but usually it is more common to just do line of sight + distance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing about a lot of shooting games is whether or not enemies or the player get 'stunlocked' from being shot.
Multiplayer FPS? You shoot a bad guy and this almost always has no stagger effect at all. Maybe ín some more realism themed or tactical games you get a large blood spatter on your screen and a camera punch, but usually it just means your health goes down.
Singleplayer FPS or TPS? All over the place. Some games you can injure an enemy and they'll do a stun or stagger animation, others none, sometimes the same applies to the player, sometimes not.
Destiny (before it jumped on the treadmill of trash content) was mechanically my favorite shooter, and unless I'm completely misremembering, there was definitely a flinch for at least higher impact weapons hitting you.
It's kind of a weird category, because a lot of them purport to be hyper realistic, and nail it in some respects, but the actual hits are super gamified. Body armor might save your life, but that doesn't mean you're going to take a couple hits to the back, run behind cover, and heal completely 30 seconds later. I'd like to see more games that didn't do health regen as an unconsidered matter of course, too.
I know what you are talking about...
The game I recommend to most people looking for a realistic enough multiplayer experience is Squad, as it is a pretty reasonable compromise between gamey aspects that allow for more action and fun, with realistic aspects that make gameplay revolve far more around group tactics rather than everyone just soloing and screaming at everyone.
... though they are apparently currently going through the same crisis that the mod they spawned from (Project Reality for bf2) did: Time to totally revamp how all aiming/weapon spread works!
And oh god yeah, the replenishing health on a timer thing... its halo's shield mechanic, but now just widely adopted everywhere with no explanation...
Basically, if you had very realistic portrayal of damage in a multiplayer team death match, it is not fun for all but the most hardcore milsim crowd.
I have played various Arma mods that actually go to the extreme to simulate a person realistically and what happens is 99% of people get angry they cannot carry an RPG, 3 rounds for it, as well as an AK and 8 magazines, then sprint for a mile, because they will literally have a heart attack and die.
With mods like that, yep, you take a round to the chest with plate armor, you get knocked to the ground... and then obliterated by 400 other rounds coming downrange.
the AI in Arma has always been basically laughably bad at tactics and movement, especially in any kind of city, but absurdly laser accurate when they do see you.
A medic has to carry morphine, epipens, bandages, tourniquets, splints, and even blood bags. Turns out a realistic portrayal of bullet and explosive damage is...
... yeah you can get lucky and take a through and through that doesnt hit bone, get patched up and maybe be semi combat effective, though you'll be limping and grunting and barely able to hit anything....
...but the vast majority of the time youre gonna need an evac or have the ability to set up a field hospital on the fly. Presented with this...? most players just suicide and respawn
It would work much better in a single player game, possibly some kind of co-op game, either with a small number of humans vs ai, or possibly something like titanfall, where there are just a few humans on each side and most of both teams are actually well written AI.
The sad truth is that many of the people who say they want realism actually cry and rage when presented with it.
It's not that it's an awful mechanic or anything, in the context of a specific game, but it's basically just automatically part of most games now. You're basically only punished for being hit if you die.
I don't mind a (visible) expanding reticle to indicate loss of precision for whatever reason, but not having an indicator seems like it would feel bad.
Well, for a lot of realism or immersion themed games, its basically taken as a given that reticles are not realistic, that blind firing a weapon is inaccurate, and that ADS should provide an benefit to accuracy whilst usually lowering movement speed and taking a bit to bring up the weapon.
Thats kind of the whole debate back in the early/mid 2000s that led to ADS becoming a thing, but with time, ADS has basically become an expected feature, even if the core mechanics underlying it are now neutered to the point that it is practically cosmetic only.
One solution I can see is doing something like what Arma does, but more immersively, more thought through.
In Arma, your point of viewing is not connected directly to your point of aim. You can look over your shoulder, fire, and the gun will fire at the vector it is pointing, not where your eyes are pointing.
What you could do is make it so that instead of your arms and the gun be pointing directly ahead at all times... they wander about the screen independent of your center of the screen, dependent on your level of woundedness and exhaustion, so that you have a visual indicator of unsteadyness... which is what blooming and closing aiming reticles were originally meant to convey, as 90s FPSs didnt have the technical ability to do that kind of animation.
You could also make it so that the weapon aiming vector chases the eye aiming vector on a delay, and that would go to significant lengths to cut down on the twitch shooter kind of thing where you can do a 180 and basically instantly be on target, cut down on the video gamey ness of many fast paced shooters.
With modern tech its also totally possible to make it so that if you are shot in the arm, maybe you drop your gun, or if shot in the leg, maybe you collapse. It is usually the case that this only happens to NPCs, but never players.
Ive made mods toying with this in Source over a decade ago now, and it was possible then, just the animations were janky as fuck from the viewpoint of anyone who is not the player.
Now we have motion matching doable in Unity and UE5 and that could absolutely make the animations look far better.
One element of online shooters is basically silly animations for a player with high mouse sensitivity doing a 180 and this basically results in them just instantly pierroutting, not needing to take steps and reshoulder the gun. With motion matching and my vector chasing idea, you can make it so there are actually fluid, believable animations, and thus penalties, for doing said 180.
Maybe some day I will be able to mock this up... kind of hard to do game dev with no real internet access (posting on 4g lol)
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.