User blog:Sammyfun1/The Death of Stealth Games.

The Death of Stealth

Stealth games as we know them are dying and, rather ironically, you may not have even noticed. It’s been a slow decline for the shadow skulking, light destroying genre, but they simply don’t get made that much any more. What used to be powerful franchises are now little but fond memories or warped variations of what once was. So, what happened?

Well, let’s go back to the start first and do a whistle-stop tour. Not the very start, but probably the most important year in stealth gaming - 1998. It was the year that two very important games launched - Thief: The Dark Project and Metal Gear Solid, both of which would define the genre for years to come.

Thief was exactly what it said on the box for the most part, casting the player as a cynical thief called Garret in a medieval fantasy world. It had you crawling through mansions under the cover of darkness to silently steal everything you could. Fair enough, it went a bit crazy towards the end, but it laid the foundations for a new breed of action. A game where you didn’t have to kill everyone; a game where, rather than looking for new weapons, you were looking for shadows. In Thief the worst thing you could do was get into a fight.

Stealth>

Metal Gear Solid was slightly different. Billed as Tactical Espionage Action, it was still stealth, but not in the same way as Thief was. It was much faster and dealt purely with line of sight rather then the light/dark mechanics of Thief. It also had one crazy plot courtesy of Hideo Kojima.

Thief spawned it’s first sequel, The Metal Age, in 2000 and the game was seen as a big improvement over the original, and pushing Thief more where it needed to go - the focus was more on actual robberies and investigation, rather than defeating demons. In the same year Agent 47 got his first outing in Hitman: Codename 47. It was a ropey game really with some very questionable voice work and some defunct missions but it was screaming with potential and put a big emphasis on using disguises.

So, by 2000, with four games and three franchises the modern stealth game was really hitting its stride. Thief, MGS and Hitman were completely different games in all respects bar their core idea which departed from the gaming norm - one guy can not take on a small army unless he’s smart about it. Thief was slow, first person, and depended on creating complete darkness to work in with; Metal Gear was faster and more than happy for stuff to explode; and Hitman required social integration with quick bursts of violence. These three formats established the format for how developers would approach the genre.

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Over the next couple of years stealth was having a wail of a time. It was invited to all the parties, girls crowding around it admiring its new and improved AI systems before publishers dragged it off to the toilets to do lines of “soft shadows” and finally passing out on a bed of Kojima ridden exposition. A mere four years after Thief had launched and Ubisoft introduced us to Splinter Cell, thrusting Sam Fisher into our screens. The genre didn't stop there either and between 1998 and 2006 there were around 14 stealth games released in the big franchises, plus newcomers ranging from The Chronicles of Riddick and the Rainbow 6 series to the SWAT series and Hidden & Dangerous.

And then, suddenly, stealth wasn’t fashionable any more. The party invites stopped. The girls were off admiring FPS’s polygon count and the publishers were off snorting micro-transactions. MMO was the big man now and all stealth could do was sit in its shadowy room, hiding from guards that weren’t even looking for it. In fact, there weren’t even any guards - they were just mannequins with disguise kits on. It was sad.

After 2006 stealth games changed and releases slowed to a crawl. We're still waiting on the ever elusive and mis-titled Thi4f. Hitman 5 is showing no signs of life, with IO off messing around with the extremely average Mini-Ninjas and Kane and Lynch series. Metal Gear and Splinter Cell have stuck it out, but only by changing/breaking to fit modern expectations.

Splinter Cell: Conviction, for example, was a great game, but it wasn’t Splinter Cell. Instead of lurking in shadows and plotting assaults and escapes you went from room to room shooting people in the head while trying to be seen as little as possible. It was an action game, a very fast paced and often linear shooter - it wasn’t Splinter Cell.

Metal Gear 4, too, was a different beast. It was full of over-the-shoulder shooting, the odd motorbike sequence, and cutscenes that were maybe a little too frequent and a little too long for some tastes. In many eyes it was still amazing, but there's no denying that it was a fair departure from the original MGS.

And it’s not like we’ve really had any new franchises picking up the slack that the tried and tested have left behind. There have been three Assassins Creed releases, but I’d argue that they aren’t really stealth because with them you can win huge fights - just master the counter button. And they aren’t really about planning attacks or being smart, you just do what you’re told and then run away - the running away is amazing mind so, yeah, good games, but when it comes down to it they aren’t stealth.

So, what happened? Well, it’s hard to tell. I can’t believe that people don’t want stealth games any more because I defy you to find a top 100 PC games list that doesn’t mention at least one game each out of the Splinter Cell, Hitman and Thief franchises, plus Rainbow Six and SWAT as strong possibilities. Instead I have more of a feeling it’s down to what publishers think we want, or what they think they can market.

Subtle>

Traditional stealth games are really quite far removed from other games; they aren’t about explosions or flashy set pieces - they’re about slowly creeping through dark corridors, they’re about waiting and thinking and planning, they’re about standing stock still with your back against a wall for three minutes while you wait for an area to clear. Hardware people can’t use it to show off their stuff because it isn’t fast paced or flashy - trying to sell a GPU by enthusing about a pitch black corridor is next to impossible. Likewise, marketing people can’t make videos exciting and eye catching (unless they cheat and try to make it look like something it isn’t) because how stealth games work doesn’t translate well into five second clips mashed together.

The other problem is that designing a stealth game is pretty tricky, especially in the modern climate. For starters it’s tough to put a decent difficulty curve on a stealth game. With other genres you can mostly just make enemies harder and more frequent and it will leave a pretty nice curve. With stealth though it doesn’t quite work: more enemies that can detect you more easily, creates two huge problems - it stops a game being fun when you have to restart a section over and over because of constantly running into trouble, or it comes to the point where the only way to progress is to fight - something that should never happen.

Stealth is at its best when we are made to feel clever, like we outsmarted the AI because we are a super spy/thief/ninja. A big firefight going wrong in a shooter is fine because you can normally blast your way out and that's the whole point of the game, but stealth is binary - you are unseen and OK, or you are seen and probably dead. It’s a fine line to walk between making the levels progressively more challenging and just progressively worse. And harder to make means more time consuming to make, which means it costs more money. When the more standard formulas of shooting men in the face sell so well, from a business perspective these are risky investment.

Suitable>

So, because of these problems stealth games died. Or to look at it another way, maybe, they just hid from view instead? Back in 2000 a game was released called Deus Ex - you may have heard of it. In that stealth was an option amongst other more violent or subversive routes, it’s why we loved it. Bewilderingly though, “stealth as an option” has taken a decade to become a viable design approach that other games have emulated.

If you consider it, you’re playing a stealth game when you cloak in Crysis, or when you hide in the bracken of Far Cry. You’re playing a stealth game when you play as The Spy in Team Fortress 2 or Recon in Battlefield. You’re playing a stealth game when creeping through a dungeon in Oblivion or a dilapidated hut in Fallout. Alpha Protocol, No One Lives Forever, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Quake Wars, the list goes on where stealth is a subsection - an option, and it’s becoming more fashionable.

As games roll in like Deus Ex, Crysis 2 and The Witcher 2, as every Bethesda RPG is released from now until forever, and as every other game that focuses on choice comes into view, we will see the stealth options. Player choice is a massive thing, and stealth is proven as a fun, engaging choice to make. Maybe one day we’ll see Hitman 5, Thief 4 (I’m not calling it that silly name again), and a new, proper Splinter Cell but until then we’ll have to manage with the New Stealth Game - the cross-breeds, the mutants, the “stealth as an option” titles.

Stealth games are dead. Long live stealth games.