Few years late but you’ll have to excuse as me I was fighting some sort of meaningful war in that time, which I lost, while others were… considering themselves entitled, I guess, and this is the life they demand…
When you make a stealth game there are a few basic principles you have to get right:
- Empowerment - the player feels in control of their environment and not vice versa.
- Recovery - from a bad situation is half the game, so it must be enjoyable.
- Mobility - you must be able to traverse freely to accomplish your goals.
‘Empowerment’ is the defining characteristic, so much so it never needs to be acknowledged or thought about, and this is where Isolation completely fucks up.
You have limited mobility due to open wider stages devoid of cover or a basic staple like a shadowing mechanic - therefore limited ability to scout your surroundings, which is a requirement for ‘empowerment’ - and the game often devolves into trial and error for scripted encounters with guards.
Recovery options are minimal and just aren’t too much fun. You can’t do something cool like grapple up to a secluded spot or dart from shadow to shadow - you run off and sit in a bloody cupboard of all things and wait for the mobs to deagro.
This is ‘disempowering’ because you can’t even see what is happening. So a method of evasion may be passive, but it still must feel like the player is in control.
What I really can’t understand is this was all a conscious design choice - to have the player feel hounded at low odds. Which is laudable, but it you are meant to create the illusion of being hounded and at low odds, ferchrissakes. You don’t embrace it and disempower the player by heading towards trial and error or random gameplay, then compound the issue by making recovery difficult and a chore.
What I can’t get - is these games nowadays have their budgets ballooned to ~50 million for production alone, predominantly due to design and engineering.
You can see the quality and professionalism with that, with this handcrafted art deco space station, much like Prey (another game with some design flaws and the classic amateur approach to story-teling, but nothing on the scale of this). It is high quality commerical art.
Yet the professionalism and insight into what makes a game good is seemingly unprogressed. There are many skilled visual artists and engineers out there, but development of the art of what makes a game fun to play is seemingly stagnant.
I just can’t understand how a multimillion dollar investment can be driven to completion, sell poorly because it isn’t fun to play as it makes some very basic conceptual errors - how on earth is it not addressed much earlier in the piece before the design is committed. Surely they knock up a barebone prototype and test it to see how it plays.
Finally - how on God’s green earth does a 50 milion dollar game end up without a jump or mantle button.
You can be killed by an unerring pincer movement as you are hemmed in by a coffee table and a knee high barrier.
Truly ludicrous. An embarrasment. That is C grade design in an AAA wrapper,
I hear people think it’s a shame because they tried something new. That’s not why it failed. It failed because the designers who made it couldn’t stop and recognise that their fundamental gameplay was not servicing their goals.
It needed to go back and be reworked to provide far more player agency, and leave disempowering events as change up.