Stealth Games Are Getting Old

[Music] stealth games video games have often been known for their over-the-top gameplay and ridiculous action an escapism into the land of the absurd where barrels explode when you shoot them and every woman and man wants to have sex with you unlike in real life where that only happens if you're chris hemsworth and while many genres of video game focus on the most balls to the wall high octane gameplay they can deliver there's another genre of game that can be just as gripping with the pure attention of sneaking up behind a man and knocking him out trust me it's a lot more gripping than it looks stealth games have been a staple of the game's industry for about as long as it's been around with many of the most popular releases being in the stealth genre but recently that genre has taken quite a hit with the assassin's creed franchise moving away from their sneaky roots and konami doing everything in their power to destroy the metal gear series besides putting a hit out on hideo kojima and according to a survey in 2018 of the most popular video game genres zero percent of people said that their favorite was stealth probably because it wasn't even an option in the survey it seems like stealth games have taken a backseat in popularity and yet ironically more games than ever have stealth mechanics in them but games like elden ring and uncharted just adding a crouch button in them isn't the same as the games that focus on the mechanic so i want to take a look at what happened to stealth games why did they have this decline in popularity why does the stealth in a lot of games kind of suck and what makes a good stealth game to begin with and before i talk about all that i just want to change real quick because i have no idea how green camo is going to show up on a green screen and i'm already sweating in this hoodie while i'm changing if you're not already subscribed please do so it really helps out the channel and i'm though there are some conflicting opinions on what the first stealth game was a popular candidate is 1979's man bicky shonen or shoplifting boy in the game you sneak around a convenience store and avoid line of sight from the owner as you try to shoplift and make money and here's what some of that gameplay looks like riveting now we've come a long way since shoplifting boy not too long in two years though as in 1981 castle wolfenstein would release and feature prominent stealth gameplay in the game you could sneak by guards and even steal their uniforms to blend in and fun fact a single micro second of this very video takes up more space than a hard drive than a copy of castle wolfenstein anyways many more stealth games would come out in the 80s and 90s since the two i just mentioned games like metal gear 1 2 when the original thief would pave the way forward for the genre and tenshu would even bring it into 3d while wolfenstein 3d would focus more on action gameplay and looking less like something i could make in microsoft excel however in 1998 the world would be changed by the release of a single game metal gear solid [Music] metal gear solid created by hideo kojima as a 3d follow-up to the 2d middle gear games would bring stealth into the limelight taking control of escape from new york homage solid snake as he infiltrates shadow moses island to save the world from terrorists and uncover the single most complicated plot ever created by man metal gear solid would single-handedly redefine the stealth genre not only was the game visually impressive and very immersive for the time the gameplay was also incredibly detailed sneaking in between enemy patrol routes mapping guard's field of vision using the radar fist fighting a clone of the bad guy from the original metal gear game who's also your twin brother while on top of a nuclear or mech robot created by a weeaboo who keeps pissing himself the game has it all metal gear solid was so revolutionary not just to stealth games but to video games as a whole that eurogamer dubbed it the first modern video game going forward i may as well just call every game a metal gear solid clone but i won't because the game already has enough mention of clones and my brain hurts just thinking about it let's just say that to this day many people still associate the stealth genre with gruff men and tactical gear wielding silenced pistols and that all came from metal gear solid this is snake do you read me ottakon loud and clear snake kept you waiting huh and speaking of gruff men with pistols and games that define genres you have deus ex and hitman which both came out a couple years later in 2000 and the important thing about these games is that they expanded upon the options presented by metal gear solid as to how you could complete the game you could shoot your way through all of the levels or be a silent assassin who killed as little as possible hitman added the series signature ability to use disguises and deus ex added rpg elements with skill trees and weapon customization the two games not only expanded stealth games as a whole but popularized and cemented the genre of immersive sim previously founded by games like system shock being a genre of game focused around freedom of gameplay and the responsiveness of the game to the player's actions it fit right in with stealth gameplay and the two genres would be forever linked this of course led to the development of dishonored much later in 2012 which is one of my favorite games of all time and almost solely responsible for my love of all things sneaky not only can you choose whether or not to kill people but the game has multiple endings depending on how much violence you inflict as well as how many people catch you and the game's levels change drastically depending on how you go through them i've played dishonored a ridiculous amount especially when i was younger and while i do recognize deus ex hitman and thief for their invention of the mechanics that i praised dishonored for adopting the game was really the first one to ever hook me into stealth games as a whole if i had to think of a reason why it would probably because in the year 2000 when deus ex originally came out i was one year old and my tiny underdeveloped baby hands could not hold a mouse and keyboard to play the game anyway a game i'm sure hooked a lot of other people on stealth games with its iconic black jumpsuit and gigantic green headlamp was splintercell released in 2002. the series took obvious inspiration from metal gear as did most of the games at the time but focused on the gameplay being more slow and methodical and had an emphasis on being as tactical as possible also i've never actually played a splinter cell game so we're just gonna pretend like i said something about how innovative and cool it was and just move on no we've got more important games to talk about like sly cooper coming out the same year as splinter cell it was playstation's attempt at a cartoon mascot that debuted in the first ever e-rated stealth game why a genre about sneaking up behind people and murdering them didn't get a kid's game before this is honestly beyond me especially when manhunt a stealth game so violent that even the developers at rockstar thought they crossed a line came out only a year later and to further increase the mature nature of stealth games you have the release of siren in 2003 which added stealth gameplay to the survival horror genre because while most stealth games would have you creeping around enemies there is a new found interest in games where you aren't the only thing creeping around in the dark the final girl hiding in a closet or sneaking around a haunted mansion is a very popular trope and a core element to horror movies so to bring it to the interactive nature of video games is a genius way to keep a player scared instead of sneaking up on people to kill them you're now the one hiding so it doesn't happen to you though it should be important to note that siren was not the game to fully popularize stealth horror that would be amnesia the dark descent in 2010 and games like alien isolation or outlast have also used the genre to great effect and what's also important to mention is that i'm a big ol scaredy cat and have never actually played one of these games but rather i've watched the funny swedish man play them on youtube so once again let's just move on sounds fair enough oh [ __ ] your chest the next big game to influence and popularize the stealth genre and probably one of the most successful attempts to do so was assassin's creed in 2007. assassins creed and more specifically assassin's creed 2 hooked a lot of people on the stealth genre by introducing mechanics like its signature parkour system the ability to hide in crowds and that lovely ubisoft open world formula that i talked about in my last video assassin's creed was successful enough that it launched one of the highest selling video game franchises of all time with new sequels coming out so frequently that one probably released while i was finishing this sentence there was also a lot more action in these games than the tactical stealth shooters that had come before which only poured gasoline on the fire that was starting to be lit under the gaming industry to include more stealth in their action releases you see video games in the 2010s were starting to reach their nexus of popularity with more and more games being released every year and with the complexity of the games increasing too many action games would start to include more mechanics like stealth or rpg mechanics to fill out their gameplay systems games like crisis tomb raider and even the uncharted series started adding stealth into their primarily action-focused titles and games like the last of us arc of asylum or the far cry series made stealth a large enough part of the game that you might be confused into thinking they were a stealth game with action elements instead of vice versa and on the other side of this the stealth focused titles were slowly moving away from just sneaking deus ex-human revolution hitman absolution splinter cell blacklist metal gear solid 5. all of these stealth games improved upon their respective series mechanics but also had a lot more action in them better ability to just blast through a level and more levels that incentivized or just straight up railroaded you into blasting and this weird blending of genres slowly eroded the core of what a stealth game even was fewer and fewer games had stealth as the main mechanic and more games had stealth as just another way to play and that leads us to present day where it is much harder for me to list stealth games that have come out recently just because it's harder to classify which are stealth and which are action with stealth in them the hitman reboot games are a current shining example of a stealth series but metal gear solid has been burned to the ground and even assassin's creed moved away from sneaking towards rpg mechanics in assassin's creed odyssey on release sneaking up behind someone and performing a stealth kill wouldn't even kill them anymore which was kind of the whole point of the series to begin with i mean next you're gonna tell me they took away the large cities that you could parkour through i'm sorry they did what for the most part the games that defined the stealth genre are dead snuck up on and killed by these stealth action hybrids that put on their uniforms and replaced them there was this other guy though army infiltration he wore a bandana or something i heard he finally retired really yep it's only me so the games that come out nowadays are nearly impossible to classify as just stealth games if the line in the sand is the game's main focus being on stealth that line has been blurred out of existence is sakuro a stealth game is the last of us two is far cry 6 the modern landscape of the stealth genre has been so decayed by its continued transformation into action and stealth blended together and this isn't just the case for games of the sneaky variety genres as a whole are all over the place and most games now can fit into two or three just because they can fit so many gameplay elements inside of them castle wolfenstein only has stealth as a primary mechanic because it could only really fit like two mechanics inside of it again keep in mind this sentence takes up more space than 5000 copies of the game looking at the newest release in the wolfenstein franchise you can see stealth action and a bunch of other gameplay elements all with enough importance that it could comfortably fit into any of those genres games have just become incredibly complicated since 1981 to make a game with the only focus being on stealth would be incredibly limiting by modern standards and aaa game studios would much rather make a game that appeals to as many audiences as possible so they include action and adventure and rpg mechanics and puzzle elements and stealth gameplay and a [ __ ] fishing mini game just as many types of gameplay as they can fit so they can advertise to as many types of gamers as they can so the stealth only approach to the genre has really only been kept alive by smaller indie titles like plague tale or shadow tactics blades of the shogun where the limited scope of the game fits right in with the limited budget and while this means that people who like sneaking around in games are more catered to than ever with pretty much every aaa game now having stealth in it this also brings up a massive problem if stealth isn't the focus of big titles and doesn't have the budget in smaller ones how can the genre improve how can stealth and games be good if it doesn't have the time or effort put in that it deserves are you going to feed him you could say that yes so what makes a good stealth game what separates the metal gear solids from these solid pieces of [ __ ] what makes sneaking and dishonored satisfying where crouching in skyrim feels like rolling a die to see if you become invisible well there's a couple of things the mechanics that make a great stealth game boil down to three main categories the ones that give the player information the ones that give the game depth and the ones that make sneaking fun to explain it more loosely the best stealth games barring the ones that flip the genre like amnesia feel like heist movies the only difference between a good stealth level and an ocean's eleven movie is the lack of brad pitt eating on camera you start off surveying and planning everything out gathering as much info as you can on patrol routes and patterns you make your plan and then execute it everything goes well but if the plan isn't perfect then something changes or goes off the rails you then have to adapt and improvise and sometimes even brute force your way through to the end and so you can see these three types of mechanics at play here you ideally want as much information as you can get so that you can form a plan of action things like radar being able to see a guard's cone of vision and an indicator for when you're about to be spotted all give you valuable knowledge because giving the player little or no information at all can make the stealth feel arbitrary or random if you can't tell when someone might spot you or if there's no clear indication on what alerts someone then the rest of the stealth gameplay can't even begin to feel responsive stealth is meant to be an advantage the player has it's meant to give them control but if a player can't get through a level because of information they don't have then that control is gone it needs to be a reliable mechanic and information is what makes it reliable and no elden ring having an enemy stare at a wall so i can get a free backstab in doesn't count as reliable especially when in other parts of the level they'll just spin around randomly like a james bond villain expecting me and what you'll notice with games that give you very little information is that they usually have very little information to give because the second element of a good stealth game is depth the game has to have a ton of complexity to keep it interesting both on the game side and the players i don't care how cool or cinematic your game is or how many cool quips nathan drake's british friend has if your game has a force stealth section where detection is an instant failure that immediately tells me that there's no depth to this mechanic a big problem with stealth games is that just the act of sneaking around can be boring and even more so if the levels in ai are very simple it can just evolve into waiting and crouching behind people to stab them a game needs to add complexity to keep it engaging in metal gear solid guards can detect you by seeing your footprints in the snow and following them in dishonored if you kill lots of guards in an area they'll bring reinforcements for your next time through in hitman you have the ability to disguise yourself as a worker but if an actual worker would recognize their co-workers faces the disguise won't work on them and all of these games have complex patrol routes with adaptive ai and tons of variety in the enemies and environment they turn the level into a puzzle that the player has to solve and then constantly change things within the level to make you rethink your solution now these games have turned waiting and crouching and stabbing into something interesting you need to actually wait and strategize how to even crouch up behind someone to safely stab them and that is a good way to think of it stealth is just a puzzle but the player should eventually solve it no matter how many times it changes so if the player solves it the same way every time that's boring they should be able to use new tactics and tools to create their own solution and the game should let them there's this channel on youtube i absolutely love called stealth gamer br it's a channel entirely focused on creative kills and insane gameplay moments in stealth games i'd highly recommend you check them out and what you'll notice in their videos is that in coming up with creative gameplay moments they use every mechanic available to them and push the games to their limits and it's at that limit where you can see just how many options the game gives you take their far cry 4 video for example they go through the game like a silent assassin killing everyone as creatively as possible but the options the game gives them are still very basic there's lots of shooting and stabbing and blowing people up because that's all you can really do compare this to their dishonored video and it's a whole other story along with shooting and stabbing people they also do this let me just recap that for you they stop time as someone shoots at them possess the person move them in front of their own bullets so he gets shot by them takes their severed head and throws it at another guy to push him into an electric barrier that's insane stuff like that is only possible because dishonored gives you so many mechanics that interact with each other like that and it's figuring out things like stealthgamer does that makes stealth games so interesting because it's one of the only genres that gives you that much freedom in how you can play and that brings me to my third type of mechanic which are the ones that make sneaking fun because again just waiting and crouching and stabbing can be really boring stealth is slower and less bombastic than just running through a level and shooting everyone so why would i do it if it's not strictly necessary well if the stealth kills are cool and satisfying and sneaking around is relatively fast and painless then i have a built-in reason to do it it's fun and for this section i'll keep things relatively short and only use one game as an example of this because it's one that i think does it really well and it's a game that i haven't really mentioned up until now ghost of tsushima the game is just fundamentally assassin's creed but with a samurai which is why i didn't really bring it up until now but every single aspect of gameplay in ghost of tsushima is incredibly satisfying movement while sneaking is fun using the grappling hook is fun using items to distract guards is even fun and stabbing people with a katana is like the coolest thing in the world the game even has one of my favorite mechanics where you can throw a smoke bomb down and then kill like 10 people in a row while they're all distracted it is consistently satisfying every single time you pull it off the game keeps things very fresh throughout by just having a massive variety of brutal ways to kill people that are incredibly fun to look at at the highest level of stealth jinju straight up cuts people's heads off even if this is still just mechanically a far cry knife kill i still want to do it over and over again the game does a great job of making that basic boring stealth gameplay loop as satisfying as it can possibly be you want to sneak around because you can stab a guy through a wall and then pull him through it and as cool as the action combat system is you can only ever do that cool wall takedown if you take the time and plan it out you have no honor and you are a slave to it so with those three types of mechanics covered hopefully i've made it very clear where the distinction between a good stealth game and a bad stealth game is good stealth games give the player lots of information have very complex levels to solve and give the player fun ways to solve them bad stealth games have a lack of information or a lack of complexity or satisfying moments and this all leads to gameplay that either bores you to tears or leaves you pulling your hair out due to a lack of consistency and here's where we wrap back around to the possible issue with modern stealth games and why i spent so much time in this video explaining their history and how it led to a lack of focus on just stealth gameplay to put it simply adding in the detail and complexity that games like metal gear solid or dishonored or even ghost of tsushima have requires an insane amount of work the complexity and freedom of gameplay required to have a good stealth game is not only incredibly time consuming for a developer but also expensive it's estimated that metal gear solid 5 cost konami over 80 million dollars to make which for comparison is the same amount that the witcher 3 took and that game came out with the second half completely missing because it was so unfinished there's a reason the best stealth games had the focus be primarily on stealth and not stealth and action and adventure and a complex system of cinematics all starring kiefer sutherland the amount of effort required to put in things that most players might not even see is incredibly demanding and not all that immediately apparent frankly speaking to a fat cat corporate exec it's never worth it they would much rather put their time and money into a bigger open world or getting gus from breaking bad to beat the villain the standard set by stealth games is very high so high that a game that just includes it as a side mechanic will never come close to making it interesting i mean metal gear solid had guards discovering bodies and reacting to noise splinter cell had a dynamic lighting system that affected their visibility hitman gave you the ability to disguise yourself as nearly every npc in the level all of those games came out 20 years ago so if a game nowadays is going to include stealth and not be as complex as a game 20 years ago then what's the point if you're adding stealth to your game and i could get a similar level of depth from castle [ __ ] wolfenstein then you're pretty obviously just slapping in the mechanic as a selling point you didn't put in the work necessary to make it engaging moving forward with stealth as a genre we have to be very careful that games coming out with it included give it enough attention to be mechanically interesting adding stealth is just another way to play can make a good action game a little better but it can also make the stealth infinitely worse i would much rather see stealth be continued as it is in the modern hitman games than as this vestigial mechanic in far cry 37 that just gives you a crouch button and says here this is what you wanted right game developers should not be stretching they're already overstuffed games with mechanics that they have no intention of fleshing out you should either go all out and put your effort into making something new and interesting to the genre or just don't bother at all spend the time you'd waste by adding a barely functional stealth mechanic in to just making the rest of the game better oh [ __ ] how did that get there thank you so much for watching this video is sort of a continuation of the open world video that i just made and here is the exact comment that inspired me to make this i do have a ton more videos of all different kinds planned for the future so hopefully those can come out soon also i by no means talked about every single stealth game out there so if there's one that i missed that you really like leave a comment about it down below if you aren't subscribed already here's a button to do that it really helps out the channel and make sure that you catch my next video as soon as it comes out and over here is my open world games video if you haven't already seen that it's pretty good so go check that out thanks again for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Lextorias

Views: 136,189

Keywords: lextorias, stealth games, metal gear solid, assassin's creed, what happened to stealth games, stealth games video essay, stealth games retrospective, stealth games video, stealth video games, best stealth games, what makes a good stealth game, the history of stealth games, stealth games are getting old, the downfall of stealth games, the fall of stealth games, stealth games have gotten old

Id: G25SRvB7TLw

Length: 23min 42sec (1422 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022