Perhaps Hitman 2 sold poorly because it shares a name with a game from 2002? :)
If they’d called it Hitman 7 people would be all over it like a rash.
For me a good stealth game involves:
- recoverable failure. If getting spotted is an instant fail, I will throw your game off a fucking bridge. (This is why I’ve never played No One Lives Forever, whose TUTORIAL includes instant fail stealth. And one reason why I hate stealth in Assassin’s Creed games)
- tools and mechanics for evading detection other than simply breaking line of sight (another thing IMO AC lacks) and dealing with threats in an interesting way.
- information about where your opposition is and what they’re doing, detection radius, sightlines, etc
- the ability to permanently eliminate obstacles and preferably not be judged for doing so.
- Ideally, unlimited save anywhere.
Stealth games can be good without involving every single one of those things, but instant failure is pretty much a dealbreaker (even if I would often reload if I fucked something up and there’s broad save availability, I’d rather do that manually instead of going through failure animations etc). I feel like Hitman 2 (2018) checks all the boxes, which is one reason I’m enjoying it so much. (You do get penalized for killing non-targets, but unlike some of the older Hitman games knocking people out and hiding their body does seem to essentially remove them from the equation indefinitely, whereas, say, the original Hitman 2 those people would guaranteed wake up and kick up a fuss when they did. So I’ve not yet felt the need to kill anyone that’s not a target.)
I can reassure you this has been removed from all the recent ACs.
I don’t mind fail states in stealth games, as long as I can understand why it happened, and can take reasonable steps to avoid. I really enjoyed the Splinter Cell games but there was definitely an aspect of “try, fail, reload” to find the critical path through the level, and that gets really old.
Stealth is dead. The only thing left is stealth as a part of the game rather than the foundation for it. Hence Metal Gear Solid V, Dishonored, Prey, Arkham Asylum, Assassins Creed, Splinter Cell Blacklist, and Red-Headed Bowgirl vs Robot Dinosaurs, all of which have stealth that segues seamlessly into shootering, slashing, or punching.
Hitman is an anomaly and as it goes forward, I bet it starts getting more and more shootery.
-Tom
I think there’s a difference between “the tip of your pinky enters a guard’s field of vision, back to the loading screen” and “you’ve alerted all the guards and they will probably shoot you to death because you aren’t some sort of super soldier”, at least for me. The latter approach may have the same result most of the time (certainly I always reloaded when a guard caught me in Thief, say) but there’s at least some vague hope. Or at least room to go manually grab a save.
I think Hitman’s “stealth” works because of the disguise system, which removes the requirement. (on a per area basis).
They did try and make a more shootery hitman though, and ironically a more stealthy one: Absolution
I remember when FPS’s were dead. (Hello Half-life!) And turn-based RPGs. (Hello Pillars!) And point-and-click adventure games. (Hello The Walking Dead!) And interactive fiction. (Hello 80 Days!) And etc etc
They’ll be back. As indies if nothing else.
…but Pillars isn’t turn-based. (And has hardly kicked off a genre revitalization, come to that - if anything the franchise’s failure to take off led to Obsidian’s buyout.)
Xcom then…
Wat…
Maybe he meant Divinity. That’s turn-based.
So much talk about stealth and no one mentioned Skyrim or Fallout games yet? I love pure stealth games as much as the next sneaky ninja, probably more, and I’d still pick Bethesda games over most of them, for two reasons: one is breaking the tension, like someone mentioned above - if you get spotted you don’t enter a fail state automatically, and the second and even more important one is that stealth in these games feels organic because the levels and enemy placement aren’t designed like a puzzle that has to be solved.
That’s… the best part of stealth games:(
It’s why I loved Mark of the Ninja, it absolutely is a wonderfully designed playground that gives room for variety in approach. A puzzle without one discrete solution.
Well, yeah. Indies is where genres go to die.
-Tom
Lol. :)
I know it’s been 12 hours since this post, but this is still making me giggle.
Doom kicked off the FPS genre in 1993. (I know it wasn’t the first, but it made them popular.) For the next 3-4 years, approximately one million Doom clones were produced. Quake came out in 1996, but by 1998 there were so many Doom clones on the market that you’d trip over one every time you walked out the door. I and every gamer I knew was thoroughly burned out on them. I even dismissed Half-life for several months after its release as just-another-shooter. I was playing Starcraft and Ocarina of Time. For first person games, I was looking for more interesting stuff like Thief: The Dark Project. FPS’s had used up their moment of glory. They were dead.
I don’t recall FPSs ever dying or I must have missed when everyone swiftly declared the genre dead during the early years following Doom because shit went wild.
I played Doom, Dark Forces, Quake, Hexan, Duke Nukem 3D, Goldeneye, Dark Forces II, Quake II, Sin, Half-life, Starsiege: Tribes, System Shock 2, Rainbow Six, a dozen different Half-life multiplayer mods, Unreal Tournament, TFC, Counter-strike, etc etc etc etc…