Summary
Perhaps befittingly for a genre about staying out of sight, the once-beloved “AAA stealth game” has all but disappeared on modern storefronts. Paradoxically, although stealth games have fallen out of favor in large studios, sneaking mechanics are ubiquitous present in their games. Players are expected to participate insome mandatory infiltration missionin just about every other one of their titles (for example, the Mary Jane segments ofMarvel’s Spider-Man), which include rudimentary mechanics like crouching in tall grass and avoiding the enemy’s line of sight but hardly anything more sophisticated.
Even games that began as stealth titles, such asAssassin’s Creed, now simplify the act of stealth into crouching and staying out of an enemy’s line of sight. However, the demand for pure sneaky action has hardly dissipated. Like many other forgotten-but-beloved niches, a few indie studios have picked up the slack where larger studios have lost interest. However, although indie studios have contributed many innovations to the stealth genre, even they have neglected to bring back a few classic features and gameplay mechanics; either because they fell out of vogue or were too difficult to imitate.
Just as theHitmanseries uses disguises to keep Agent 47 concealed, clothing inMetal Gear Solid 3isn’t just a fun unlock or a granular stat boost: it is used to help Snake blend into his environment. Camouflage was used in2015’sMetal Gear Solid 5: ThePhantom Pain, but this feature has not been seen in any espionage games since. A probable cause might be that implementing such a system (for enemy AI) would require significant programming and design effort. An indie studio would need to develop a whole game around it.
Camouflage doesn’t have to be limited to clothing or face paint. Consider Dutch’s brilliant use of camo inPredatorwhen he covers himself in mud to disguise himself in the jungle, protecting him from the eyes (and thermal vision) of the titular alien, or Frodo’s boulder-colored cape inThe Two Towers.Strangely, the concept has been used in urban or indoor settings. Snake’s cardboard box or Morgan’s ability tomorph into inanimate objectsin 2017’sPrey, and getting covered in gore inDying Light(with a skill effect that lasts less than a minute), but no modern stealth game has since fully embraced the art of natural cover.
AlthoughAlpha Protocolis technically classified as an action RPG, it singularly brought one aspect of infiltration missing from the stealth scene: impersonation. At several points in the game, players are expected to leverage their intuition, ability to read social cues, and the background knowledge of a target tomanipulate NPCs through dialogueoptions. While this certainly has a different feel than slinking through waist-high grass or crawling through vents, it emphasizes the more intimate and interpersonal aspects of spy work.
Games likeHitmanuse a disguise system to allow players to go undercover, but at no point is Agent 47 ever expected to explain himself or use a silver tongue to slip by, and nothing quite beats the thrill of fooling the enemy into buying feigned innocence with a face-to-face chat. Multiplayer games likeAmong Usask players to use theirdeceptive powers against friends, and while this is a brilliantly fun feature, it isn’t quite the same as having to maintain long-term cover behind enemy lines, something that NPCs should be able to provide in a single-player infiltration.
Breaking a lock or safe while trying to avoid detection is a nail-biting experience, especially when the mechanic is expressed as a minigame, and more so if it plays out in real-time. There areplenty of examples of lockpicking minigamesin RPGs with stealth gameplay, such asFalloutorKingdom Come: Deliverance, but this feature has been dropped from pure stealth titles since around the time ofThief 4. Where the necessity of opening a door appears, modern stealth games tend to skip over the challenge, like when Snake picks a lock inThe Phantom Painafter a short animation.
Although it is done automatically, there is still a chance to get caught. However, the excitement of having to delicately cajole a tumbler into falling in place with trembling hands is notably absent. Sneaking-related minigames aren’t unheard of in modern titles. For example,Assassin’s Creed: Mirageuses a timing-based pickpocket minigame. However, this is more reaction-based and misses the delicate balance of finesse and speed that made lockpicking minigames so captivating during infiltration.
Tight movement, smooth acrobatics, andimpossibly cool wall-scalingare hardly a novelty in stealth games. But while theAssassin’s Creedseries and its parkour system still hold strong, there is one wall-scaling move that has been forgotten by history (and even by the series that invented it): the split jump. The gymnastic move, first seen inTom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, may seem esoteric or niche, but it is hard to deny the appeal of the technique. The split jump isn’t just used to climb to high places.
It can be used to avoid detection and can also be used on sheer, smooth walls, providing that the two walls are close enough together. The half-split jump does the same thing but in even more narrow spaces. The long, narrow corridor is often a stealth player’s worst nightmare, but the split jump, or half-split jump, would allow them to make a stylish escape, providing the ceiling is dark enough. Nothing quite beats the feeling of looking down at unaware sentries from the shadows while doing the splits.
Modern games strive to help their players in any way they can. While it is empowering to have gadgets that allow players to see through walls, get a detailed bird’s-eye view, and even get a frame-by-frame update of their location via minimap, information saturation deflates the tension the player should feel about breaking and entering and makes it a game of “follow the marker.“Without a dynamic map, quest markers, or detective vision, the player will have to pay attention to their surroundings, gather contextual clues in notes or the environment, and build their own internal mental models, as they had to in games likeThief 3: Deadly Shadows.
While there’s a risk of letting the player get lost, frustrated, or inconvenienced, those players who use their wits and logic will walk away from the game with a richly textured experience of shadow-cloaked exploration. Modern stealth games all too often drop information about the enemy’s cone of vision, their whereabouts, patrol roots, or objective destination on the player’s lap. This is more of a problem in AAA space than in indie, which has somewhat picked up on the upsides of keeping the player in the dark with information. That being said, while there are talented artists in the scene, indie studios do not have the time or resources to craft the richly ornate, realistic environments or even the sprawling alternate pathways that could make blind indoor exploration such an immersive joy.
