I loved climbing the trees around enemy camps and dropping down on the bad guys from above in Rise of the Tomb raider:
It just occurred to me that Thief turns twenty this year.
I love stealth and it does make for some great moments, but my favorite is a scene in Splinter Cell where some guy is boasting that if someone tries to invade he’ll make mincemeat of them. When you go there and grab him, he changes his discourse pretty quickly. :)
There’s also this one (the first scene):
I don’t know about a favorite stealth mechanic, per se… I mean, if I say the original Thief remains the best stealth game of all time, does that cover it? ;)
As far as stealth moments, I have two.
One of them, as loathe as I am to say it, was in World of Warcraft. It was shortly after release. I was playing a night elf hunter, my husband was a gnome rogue. We were on a PvP server. He, of course, could be invisible whenever he wanted, but for me, as a night elf, I had shadowmeld and that was it, and of course you couldn’t move while in shadowmeld.
So we had just entered the Arathi Highlands from the Wetlands, and were heading down the path when we saw a group of about 4 or 5 horde coming toward us, but a distance off. We knew they had seen us. My husband stealthed immediately. There wasn’t really anywhere for me to hide (Arathi Highlands doesn’t have a lot of hiding places) and I was on the road… but there were huge stone archways here and there over the road. I quickly dodged behind one of them, breaking line of sight to the horde and shadowmelded.
A few moments later, the enter group of horde went running up the road, right past me, fanning out into the grass, clearly in a search pattern. The gave up pretty quickly though and went on their way.
That was, of course, in the early days when the game was new and no one thought of shadowmeld when they’d see a player disappear. I’m pretty sure shadowmeld never got me out of trouble again in my entire WoW tenure, at least not when I’d already been spotted. But it felt pretty good. :D
The second moment was playing MSG5. I don’t recall the mission, but there was a truck with a couple of baddies driving a patrol around the entire map. They’d stop at outposts, get out, go chat with some other NPCs, then get back in their truck and continue their patrol. They were pretty much impossible to knock out without alerting someone, but I needed to stop their patrol. So after watching them get out of their truck at the side of the road and head into a camp, I instead stole their truck and drove it a way up the road, hiding it somewhere.
I went back to my hiding place to watch the outcome, because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. What happened was they returned to where they left the truck and proceeded to have a dialogue about where the truck had gone. They then called into HQ to report the truck was gone, and said they needed another. HQ informed them that they had no spare trucks so they were out of luck. After some complaining, the two guys just started walking up the road, presumably to continue their patrol on foot. At this point I was able to knock them both out (since they weren’t walking side by side), but the whole incident was amazing. The fact that they were scripted to recognize their vehicle was gone, argue about it, call HQ, get a response and then carry on anyway was probably the best thing I’ve ever seen in any game ever. Kojima is a genius. :D
Very cool stories!
I really need to get back into MGS5 again. I can’t remember why I stopped.
I was creeping around in one of the first Call of Duty type games and it was a night stealth mission. The atmospheric background sound loop was an endless cricket sound. I’m creeping around a small town in France at night and these crickets are driving me crazy. It seems to get louder and start resonating. It’s starting to bug me for some reason, I think I probably died and reloaded a free times. I turn the sound down a bit. All the gunfire and other sounds are muted except that damn cricket still! Is there some crickets at night sound feature I can turn off?
I turn it all the way down. It’s quiet for several seconds. Then I hear the cricket again. No way. I turn the speakers physically off. Cricket again.
Ha ha. There was a real cricket, of course, under the TV stand and it was saying hello or come have sex or whatever back. When I turned it down it was like: ‘Where’d everybody go?’
This is amazing. I should reinstall MGS5 some day… ;)
Yeah I love the MSG5 truck story. That kind of emergent narrative is getting really interesting. B
Huh…we didn’t notice that… ;)
Oh yes, I’d forgotten about my great real life stealth moment. It was on a school trip to France and I was one of the younger kids there, probably 13 or so. One night I was playing with a friend in a rocky area that was part of the hotel compound. It was pretty dark and some of the older children were having a game of hide and seek. We were doing our best to avoid them, despite not being part of their game.
A group of them approached over a hill and we hid. There weren’t any large rocks to hide behind or anything, so my friend crouched down while I curled up among the rocks. My friend got spotted and they wandered over to check he wasn’t someone they were looking for. They stayed to chat for a while. Maybe 90 seconds later, they finally spotted me on the floor right next to them.
Another great stealth moment (in a non-stealth game): that mission in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. You know the one.
I miss Tenchu.