Genre Discussion - Stealth

Stealth

            Stealth is probably the most difficult genre to develop a game correctly in. However, if you do it right, the Stealth genre may be the most rewarding/challenging/fun genres of them all. From a personal side, it took me until I was a young adult to enjoy the stealth genre because it requires an extremely high level of patience that young players simply have not developed yet. This balance is what makes stealth a unique genre that sounds out from all others.

            A good stealth game has to be challenging so that the reward for being stealthy feels like an extreme victory. In order to help accomplish this, the mechanics, specifically the controls, must be perfectly balanced and fluid. A good stealth game also gives the player a multitude of choices for how they accomplish a task, or if they can only complete a task one way the challenge cannot be so overly difficult or complicated that the player just quits in frustration. Due to these requirements, level design becomes a major component of good stealth design. Typically stealth game levels begin to be designed around verticality, feeding on the strengths of the games mechanics; as well as, offering the player multiple horizontal routes.

            There are several games that display great stealth mechanics like the Splinter Cell, Sly Cooper, Hitman, and Thief series. However, as far as recent games are concerned, Dishonored is the best stealth game I have ever played. Like its contemporaries, the player always has the choice to "go loud" or "be stealthy", but gives the player greater rewards for taking the extra time/effort to "be stealthy". Unlike its contemporaries though, the challenge the stealth route requires from players is balanced to where it feels do-able and more fun than just running around murdering everyone in sight. Additionally, the rewards for a stealthy approach are more tangible and the gameplay mechanics of having powers (i.e. teleportation, possession, slow down/stop time, etc.) really make it feel like the game was meant to be a stealth game. Lastly, Dishonored's level design featured environments that could be traversed both vertically and horizontally based on how the player wanted to tackle an area/objective; a design which I have never seen another game master.

            When I think of bad stealth games, I think of games that were so frustrating that, despite being designed to be played stealthily, "stealth-ing" was impossible due to the design/mechanics of the game. The games that come to mind when I think about this situation are the Hitman games prior to Hitman: Bloodmoney. The main reason that the early Hitman games are such terrible stealth games was their clunky and unbalanced controls. In order to silently take out targets, the player had to crouch walk - which any enemy's normal walking speed was faster by a factor of at least two and no enemy stayed still longer than a second or two, and push the action to garrote the enemy - an action that triggered a slow executing animation that had to be preformed when the Player Character was essentially touching the intended target. More often than not, this tactic failed, rendering a stealthy approach nil impossible. Furthermore, trying to stealthily take out a target and failing meant raising the alarm and again voiding an attempt at stealth. This made for a rage quit-inducing frustration and is the perfect example for why stealth games are so hard to do well.



Derek holds a Bachelor's Degree in Game Design and has two and a half years of game development experience. To view other work please visit www.dereksinex.com or his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/JDKevlar