Gaming The Death of Stealth

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2010/11/01/the-death-of-stealth/1

 

The Death of Stealth!

Well what did you expect when developers gave everybody guns, grenades, and predator drones. Bring back the Ninja and you will bring back a proper stealth game.

 

I think I replayd the Thief and Himan series at least 4-5 times, love stealth games.

 

Depends on which sort of Ninja.

 

try velvet assassin.. thought that was pretty good minus the ran out of budget ending

 

to be fair, atleast two great mmo's have implemented a bit of the "stealth gaming", though maybe not as well as the pure "stealthers".

in ddo you can play as a rogue (or any other class) and get a high enough stealth ability to actually just pass by the enemies and complete the quest with minimal violence (killing 2 rather than killing 50), though this can not be done to other players and unfortunately you can't run about robbing people (man i would've loved that).

in EVE online you can scan players down (in your system), be it miners or pve:ers and steal their loot or what's in their cargo (providing they dump some of it in cargo containers which float around in space). you can also fit your ship with cloaking devices, allowing you to fly through enemy (or zero security, heavily pirate infested) space without being noticed (not showing on anyones scan's) stealing from other players (high value loot) or flying into npc areas and steal whatever they have. (there are other ways to be a ninja in eve too).

so atleast some have that feature, letting us who are born ninjas to act out on our nowadays seemingly perverted wish to do damage without being seen.

 

Maybe I'm just terrible at this game, but I HAVE to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky as a stealth game to survive, and I love it. I can't stand playing Modern Warfare or its ilk, even Dragon Rising seems a bit too forgiving compared to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series or to ARMA I/II and the original Flashpoint. I'm not the best MW player, but the game itself isn't really hard (campaign) it's more that the achievements are challenging. I remember the bruising first brushes with Rainbow Six, Delta Force, SiN, Deus Ex, Thief, Goldeneye on 00 Agent, Half-Life on Hard, and the stubborn pride that dared me to drop the difficulty level, because it wouldn't just mean I was too lazy to survive the game, it would mean I was too dumb. I have less time to game now, so I do appreciate games that let me save instead of having to hit a checkpoint, so maybe I've softened a bit. But I like games that make me feel like I'm fighting for my virtual life and that if I am alone, only my mental faculties and precision will save me.

 

well WoW had/has (not played it in ages) stealth to. The rogue use to able to bypass alot of mobs just to kill off the 1 boss that you needed, sometimes through entire dungeons.

 

I would like to see a good ninja game, nice and stealthy

sneak in kill the person you came for and sneak out, good thing about ninja's is the have all sorts of wapon gear, so if you do get in trouble you can at least kill and disappear in smoke of your smoke boms.

but oblivion does do a nice jobs i still love creeping trough that game shooting people from the shadow waiting till it calms down before shooting the next one that happely wonders by me without seeing me

 

Plenty of stealth in Amnesia: the dark descent, but granted, that's the exception.
The decline of stealth games and of horror games is connected.

 

What are you talking about? The best stealth game ever was released last year. And the sequel is being developed.

Batman: AA

Sure it is empowered stealth, but it is still stealth. You can't just walk into a room full of dudes with guns, picking them off is great.

 

I loved HItman Blood Money, still one of my fav games. And Batman AA was great, still lots of action and it was maybe a bit easy to fight a group of people, but hte sneaky bits were great!

 

Part of the problem with stealth is that eventually you just want to walk in to the street twin ballers in hand and go postal...

... Though generally only after a couple of attempts at a level.

 

The amount of pop-culture references nearly made my head explode. In a good way.

 

Eh like music and clothing each genre has its days, dies and comes back again, just waiting for the space sims to come back again from the early to mid 90s when it died.....when people get bored of FPS

 

Tis a shame... I used to love trying to get through every Metal Gear Solid game without setting off an alarm (Unless scripted... that bloody comms tower after Sniper Wolf in MGS1 for example...) and managed it, still to this day, I've no idea how...

The "Crap, am I hidden enough? Can they see me from here? What's my avenue of escape if needed?" mode, no longer exists because it almost feels like alot of gamers these days, just aren't capable of understanding this, they just press the trigger and stuff dies/explodes.

 

The greatest ninja/stealth game I've ever played is Tenchu: Stealth Assassins for the PS1, released in 1998 also. Not as refined as Thief of MGS but I found the replayability value far superior. I used to spends ages trying to perfect each mission, killing all the guards on the map as quickly as possible without being seen to get the highest Grand Master rating. The best bit of course was sitting back and enjoying the animations of the elaborate butchering techniques employed after having performed a succesful stealth kill! Shame the series went down the pan with its future releases on PS2 and Xbox.

 

I do like stealth is an option type games when done well. There have been a few times though when I've invested heavily in stealth only to come across a section that requires me to fight and I spend the next few hours running away from things chipping of tiny amounts of health as I go. Or alternatively stealth can be rather over powered and so becomes not so fun, oblivion is a good example, where my stealth became so good I can waltz up to people and poke them in the ear without them spotting.

 

I remember fondly games that were hard to complete, not just games that were a challenge in terms of achievements. STALKER Clear Sky is my current game of choice and I feel like it requires a lot of stealth to survive and it is brutally unforgiving of error. That's what I loved with Thief, Operation Flashpoint, and even Half-Life and Goldeneye 007. Modern Warfare is not my cup of tea, but I think a lot of what really bothers me in that genre of FPS is the idea that your actions really don't have consequences. If my death doesn't really matter in the game, than odds are my problem solving doesn't either. There was nothing more satisfying in Thief than to pull of the perfect heist knowing that the enemy was never even aware of your presence. It's a slower build leading to a greater payoff in my opinion, and I look forward to (thanks @thelaw) the genre making a comeback in full someday. As an aside, I thought it was awesome how in the second Splinter Cell shot, the opponents were dressed like Sam USED to be dressed and he like them. =0]

 

I think the problem is that publishers are aiming console gamers. Console gamers need simple games yet fast ones. Every game is now dumbed down to fit consoles, and the games we see in PC are just some kind of port from console. Stealth games are NOT for the faint of heart (aka console players). They are well elaborated and need carefull planing.

In other words, whats is killing PC games are the console games. Thank god we still have the strategy ones that can ONLY be played weel on pc.