Stumbled upon this randomly today and thought it was surprisingly good, especially for the subscriber count. Particularly the bit about the inherent problem of save scumming in stealth games is something I’ve thought about writing about myself, but I guess someone else got there first, as this is pretty much an exact mirror of my thoughts.
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Pretty thorough breakdown, and I’d agree with most of it. Some paraphrased bullet points though:
Perhaps stealth isn’t doing well right now because of all of those bad stealth sequences in non-stealth games that are otherwise great
Possible, but I doubt it. The late 90s and early 00s was full of those too, but that was also simultaneously the height of stealth games. I think it’s just that fads come in waves. Underground racing games were hot when The Fast and the Furious started. World War II shooters were popular after Saving Private Ryan, and modern military shooters followed when a lot of the target demographic either fought in the war on terror or knew someone who did. Dungeons & Dragons and a lot of Led Zeppelin’s catalogue only exist because The Lord of the Rings books made a huge impression on people. If something in the cultural zeitgeist comes along that would make a good stealth game, there will be more stealth games; at this point, the last James Bond movie was 5 years ago, and the next one won’t be for a while still.
A good compromise we landed on rather than perfect wallhack vision was to mark targets
Perhaps, but I’m even kind of sick of that, too. I played a good portion of MGSV without tagging and found it perfectly playable, largely because, as he acknowledges in the video, you can scope it out from any angle from far away before you make your approach. This is something the original Deus Ex and Ghost Recon: Wildlands do well too, even though the latter also does the trivialized target marking. I don’t mind some light wallhacks when you’re up close to simulate the character’s hearing, like in The Last of Us. If we found ourselves in that stealth situation in real life, we’d have pretty good three-dimensional awareness of enemy locations just by the way sound bounces off the walls, and I think it’s okay to represent that in some way. I think the marking target mechanic is so prevalent because Ubisoft made a large number of games featured in this video and inspired more still; and Ubisoft for the last decade and change has been a company that made an efficient machine for churning out games that used a lot of common mechanics between multiple franchises.
Playing through 007 First Light right now, a lot of my most common grievances are in predictability, but not of the enemies. There are a lot of context-sensitive actions, and while this game has a sort of tutorial that we’ll be talking about for years, it did a poor job of explaining those contexts to me. I had similar issues blackjacking guards in Thief, and there’s that guy-on-the-couch section in Splinter Cell that he highlights in the save scumming section that you could describe much the same.
Gotta say, the alien in Alien: Isolation is my favorite “guard” in stealth games. That encounter in the medical area really is something.
He touches briefly in the video on the fact that horror games do get around some of the challenges of stealth games, seeing as there is still tension in hiding from a monster.
But honestly, it’s all just a question of immersion, even that. Horror games get much less scary without stakes, and few games implement them well. That’s another good subject for a video essay. The alien in Alien: Isolation becomes much less scary once you realise it’s just a walking reload button. So what if it catches you? You can just try again. Same issue as with most stealth games, only with an added jump scare.
That’s why I think games like Until Dawn have solved the issue of horror game stakes the best. In a regular horror game, the main character can never die before the game is over. That means failure just leads to reloading. In an ensemble game, your poor performance can get people killed and bad things happen, but the story trudges on. That keeps the tension high.
Another way is with some sort of permadeath. Darkwood on hard mode with limited lives is fucking scary. Some sort of stakes is needed for the fear to set in, unless your game produces horror from a different angle (existential, cosmic, psychological, visual body horror etc).
Anyway, I guess I got a bit sidetracked here 😅 I do agree that as far as AI behaviour goes, the alien in Alien: Isolation is an excellent guard!
The paranoia is what makes the alien scary to me. Its footsteps are pretty loud, so you know it’s close by, but you don’t know if it’s going to hop back into a vent or walk into the room you’re in. The alien is also smart enough to prepare ambushes, too. I’ve seen it crouch down and wait for anything passing by.
