Summary
There is a fine line between fun and frustration in video games, stealth games in particular. While the creaky floors that give away the player’s position or the sudden 180 of an idle guard may cause great annoyance, they add to the challenge and make the experience tense, exciting, and memorable. The truly annoying features are those that give the impression of being undercooked or downright cheated. While their mechanics arealmost ubiquitous in most open-world gamesor RPG titles, the stealth genre’s prime seems to have passed, at least when it comes to AAA output.
But trends in video games come and go and often come back again, and in the indie space, stealth is alive and well. For infiltration-enthusiastic indie groups, some future AAA studio working on the next thrilling stealth series, or just fans of the genre, there is much to be learned about the mistakes of stealth games (besides learning not to throw a controller at the fish tank after being discovered, even while prone in tall grass, after the 8th attempt). Beware of sneaky, backstabbing spoilers ahead.
Besides being hard to make, pure stealth games tend to be hard to market. Trailers need to be bombastic and action-packed, but a good stealth game (besides any gory shadow takedowns, if the game happens to have any), works best when building slow-rising tension. To resolve this (and perhaps make players appreciate the main focus of the game once the encounter is done), some studios will throw in sections that throw out the player’s careful planning and patience with a section that cannot be overcome with stealth.
This was famously done inDeus Ex: Human Revolution, especially the game’s original cut, where each boss stood as a non-negotiable fight.Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Convictionalso suffered from genre mixing the highly-refined stealth mechanics with forced action mechanics. Consider this feature the stealth-game equivalent of theforced stealth sections in open-world games. Even Metal Gear Solid falls prey to this but makes up for it during its forced action sections by (mostly) keeping them short, and additionally, many of the series' bosses can be defeated using sneaking.
Escort segments in any game are notoriously hated, but in a game that emphasizes the fragility of the protagonist, for whom their only salvation is their nimble movements, there is nothing worse than having to drag around someone even more vulnerable while having absolutely no control over them whatsoever. One of the most infamous and high-profile examples is, of course, the Emma Emmerich rescue part inMetal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
Not only is Raiden tasked with rescuing a woman with aquaphobia (on an artificial island), but he also has to put up with her squeamishness about bugs and is then tasked with leading her through flooded hallways. The only redeeming part is that the section is short, unlike the jungle escape inMetal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, in which Snake has to drag an injured Eva to safety while enemy forces close in. The only way to handle a stealth escort is by making it so that the escort in question is, to enemy AI,invisible, has stellar AI, or is likable, for example, Ellie inThe Last of Us.
In stealth games, one wrong move or misjudgment can mean having a complete restart. For this reason, it is essential to give players enough information to make sound decisions. This includes their alertness level, player awareness, and next probable actions. Real-world infiltrators have far more acute senses than a camera with hands, and sometimes, the player isn’t even working from a first-person view. The forced perspective ofMetal Gear Solid, in which enemies can hide out of the player’s sight, even if Snake himself is looking at them dead on. This prompted Hideo Kojima to implement one ofMetal Gear Solid’smost useful gadgets, the Soliton Radar, a minimap of the area that shows the guards' position and even vision.
The originalMetal Gear Solid 3used the same overhead camera, but as many fans found stealth much too difficult without the radar, Kojima implemented a dynamic camera system. Two decades later, if anything, stealth games can potentially overload players with intel. From being able to see through walls (Batman: Arkham Asylum) and having a dynamic tracker of enemy movement (Assassin’s Creed Origins) to letting map markers, minimaps, and a “Focus Mode” UI do all the work (Thief 4), players are never left in the dark about what to do, which not only kills immersion but erases but the thrill of the unknown and makes the mission a chore.
On its face, tailing missions, which were frequent features ofAssassin’s Creedin its pirate ship era, peaking withBlack Flag, seem to suit stealth games perfectly. They offer a chance to deliver exposition, organically bring the player from one location to the next, and test the player’s skill as they scramble to find cover from one street, corridor, or rooftop to the next. The problem with tailing missions is that they are essentially reverse escort missions, and they tend to be linear. A good stealth experience allows players to get a feel of their environment. They need to feel as though their pathfinding through patrol routes or dusty vents was their own achievement.
A one-off tailing isn’t so bad, but regularly forcing players out of their spatial problem-solving flow and into a long, linear, performative watch-and-wait sequence can quickly burn out their enthusiasm, making them some ofthe most disliked missions in Assassin’s Creed. Additionally, falling too far behind or getting too close results in an instant game over, and the inability to turn things around can become grating. If the target moves too slowly, it can feel punishingly dull. But if they move too fast, or there are multiple guards to avoid or pitfalls to leap, any exposition will go right over the player’s head. The dialogue used to deliver the exposition becomes an annoyance after several retries as the player is forced to listen to the same conversations again and again.
In real-world games of hide and seek, deadly or not, it’s possible to get spotted by somebody out of sight. This may seem obvious, but to many stealth fans, one of the most infuriating experiences is being seen by an off-screen sentry. For whatever reason, be it a quirk of human psychology or an expectation of fairness when playing a game with rules, virtual or otherwise, it just isn’t something most players can accept and can lead to the feeling that the enemy force is usingcheat codes to get aheadand win.
Even if the player has total control over the direction of the camera, a legitimately placed enemy is going to appear at the player’s back at some point.Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, being an open-world game, levels the playing field by giving Snake a “sixth sense tingle,” which appears on the player’s screen as a fuzzy thumbprint in the direction of the scout or sniper and is usually followed up with intel from Mother Base about the sharp-sighted enemies ahead.
Going up against an overwhelming force with nothing but a lockpick, a combat knife, and sneaking britches is one thing, but getting discovered and then immediately rushed by every trooper on the base, who is now suddenly aware of the intruder’s location, is quite another. Pure stealth games have generally been good about handling this aspect of detection by giving players a couple of seconds to react before the guard calls for help, either verbally or via radio.
However, games that make stealth a part of their regular gameplay loop, such asFar CryandMetro: 2033, or pretty muchevery first-person roleplaying game, are all examples of games with hive-minded guards that are seemingly telepathically linked. It isn’t a bad idea to remind players that trying to muscle their way through won’t work, but giving sentries an “in shock” phase where it takes them a few seconds to fumble to a walkie-talkie before the whole base descends is just good gaming courtesy.
