The Annoying Tendency To Mix Styles of Play In A Single Game

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

The Annoying Tendency To Mix Styles of Play In A Single Game

Do you want to play a shooter or a stealth game? Most AAA titles these days give you that option, and Yahtzee thinks that's a bad idea.

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[dangoball]

I feel Deus Ex: Human Revolution also fell prey to this dual gameplay ideology, especially since it's an RPG. Sure, you can shoot your way through, but non-lethal silent takedown gives 40 xp, headshot kill 20 xp, normal kill 10 xp. This gears one mechanically towards stealth play-style. Hacking also provides additional experience, but requires big xp investment to open it up fully, therefore you have to be stealthy to get to hacking. Narratively one is also pushed towards stealth, because more experience means hacking which in turn means more details about the world.
Unless it was a scripted sequence (sniping around helicopter), getting shooty always felt like a fuck-up. And another problem is that while going from stealth to shooting was not that difficult due to weapon upgrades, going the other way mid-game would be nearly impossible due to insufficient xp pool and non-optimal skill selection.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

What, Yahtzee reads our comments?

OMGZ IM FANGURLING OUT

Seriously though, it's funny. I wanted to make a thread about exactly what Yahtzee was talking about. I was thinking that games should either be stealth or something else, no stealth mechanics on the side. Who here actually played Far Cry 3 as a shoot em up? Or played Deus Ex Human Revolution as a run n' gun? Or Skyrim as a non-sneaky mage/knight? Hell, even in CoD I used to try and play like a ninja! It was tedious and annoying most of the time.

Funny that he brought up Dishonored as well, because I rage quit that game due to my feeling that I was being forced by the game to choke every single guy instead of blowing off their heads or knifing their throats or setting flash eating rats on them.

Mr. Croshaw, you and I seem to be very similar people.

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

I know it gets a lot of hate, but I like the rails Call of Duty puts you on for mixing up the experiences. There are clear sections where you are supposed to sneak, there are clear sections where you are supposed to shoot, and if the mission moves from one to the other it's very obvious about when that happens (usually by blowing up something). Your expectations in each part are clear, and the levels are built for that style of play.

Hardline's 'open room with a few guys, move to the next place' always feels like a letdown if you do decide to shoot because you get no momentum. In CoD you start shooting and running around, grenades are going off and Generic Grizzled Sergeant is shouting your instructions, so you start rushing forward. In Hardline there's enforced breaks as you go from one zone to the next, where you feel your heart rate slowing down as you jog to the next area.

 

[Thanatos2k]

This only works if done very carefully, and your designers have to be competent.

1. Each style of play must be equally viable and equally fun.
2. One style of play must not give more rewards than another. (Non-lethal should NOT give more exp than lethal, for example)
3. Don't suddenly force one style of play at points during the game when you've let the player build their character for another (Deus Ex HR boss battle are the go-to example)
4. Don't tie it to achievements, and/or don't hide those achievements.
5. NEVER tie the ending or story to the gameplay style chosen. (Except perhaps at critical junctures where you allow the player to choose what they want to do)

 

[09philj]

Sometimes, letting people approach a problem how they want can work, to an extent. Halo 3 would often dump you in front of of a large open area, and say "run wild," leaving it up to you whether you wanted to pick each enemy off with a battle rifle, charge forwards in a vortex of needle rounds and flailing punches, or strafe everything in sight with a vehicle mounted weapon. The crucial point is that the game didn't treat you any differently for taking any one approach; as long as all the enemies all died, it didn't matter how you achieved it.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I find it really annoying when a stealth mission you have to play as a stealth mission is stuck in the middle of a shooter. I'm playing the shooter to shoot stuff, but then to get to the next shooting stuff I have to go through the stealth level...or use a cheat, which is what is more likely.

 

[immortalfrieza]

The triple-A games market is nothing if not broad these days. Common denominators are hanging pretty lowly at present. But you can hardly blame the creators for that. Since the cost of developing on the cutting edge is so high, getting as many people to buy the game as possible is almost essential for making the investment back. Would be nice if we could have a mainstream industry where creative expression doesn't have to be so dependent on monetization, but then I'd also like a cloaking device and that's not happening either.

Actually, we can blame the creators, considering it's entirely their fault. They keep trying to one up themselves and each other by shooting up the graphics as far as they technology allows without any concern for the actual importance of it to the game they are creating while making the gameplay more excessively spectacular and over the top with each game, driving up costs to more and more absurd levels every passing year instead of doing the intelligent thing and focusing on substance over style and trying to make developing these very games quicker and easier and thus MUCH cheaper BEFORE trying to ramp them up. Worse, doing this encourages the mentality in the minds of the gamers that each game absolutely MUST exceed everything that came before it, which encourages the developers to continue ramping everything up, repeat ad infintium.

The entire REASON creative expression is so dependent on monetization is because these creators make it that way, and they get away with it because of the rationalization that that's what the customer want, failing to recognize the entire reason the customer want that is because the creators MADE them want it.

 

[Fat Hippo]

Yay, I actually agree with Yahtzee about video games, for once. Doesn't happen often.

The one game which actually did a pretty good job of mixing stealth and action was Far Cry 3, but that was mostly because stealthing in that game was about killing as many enemies as you could before all hell broke loose. In that sense, there was hardly any need to stealth, and the game wasn't so hard as to demand it most of the time, but it was still fun to knife a few guys before the explosions started.

 

[Kahani]

Part of that comes from the fact that, it most cases, there's no way to go back and try the stealthing from the top once the shooting starts, you're locked into shooty mode until the room is cleared; so much for choosing what kind of game we want to play.

I'd not really thought about it before, but this may be why Shadow of Mordor is so satisfying compared to similar sorts of games. It's the only one I can think of where fighting and stealth are both meaningful fallbacks to each other. If you screw up stealth you tend to end up in a big fight, as is standard. But if you get in over your head in a fight, you can run around the corner and don't even need to wait until they stop looking for you before sneaking around to take people out stealthily. Even in other more open games where running away is possible (Skyrim, for example), there tends of be an official "you have failed at stealth" state that doesn't allow you to do anything other than fight until you've run halfway across the country and the encounter is well and truly over. SoM does a very good job of not just allowing you to choose how you want to play at the start, but allowing you to freely change your mind at any time (other than during a few optional missions with hard failures when stealth is part of the completion conditions).

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

I find it odd that no one has mentioned Wolfenstein: The New Order in here yet. It is probably the best realized dual-concept shooter as of yet, as it manages to mix not two, but three separate play styles and make them all equally valid and fun. You can go stealthy, you can play modern cover shooter or go old school run and gun and all three work equally well and you never feel penalized for choosing one over the other. In fact, most of the game I had fun switching back and forth between styles of play, alternating between stealthing and run and gunning and both had really satisfying game play.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

You are crushing my dreams to make a first person match 3 visual novel.

 

[StreamerDarkly]

Not sure about this. You might be right that trying to allow vastly different playstyles doesn't add any depth and can actually make the game worse. Perhaps a more careful map design could hint at which is the preferred option for different sections?

I actually really liked the Special Ops missions in CoD MW2, where some of them required you to be more methodical and stealthy than just ramboing it. These were separate and distinct from the main campaign though.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

I feel Deus Ex: Human Revolution also fell prey to this dual gameplay ideology, especially since it's an RPG. Sure, you can shoot your way through, but non-lethal silent takedown gives 40 xp, headshot kill 20 xp, normal kill 10 xp. This gears one mechanically towards stealth play-style. Hacking also provides additional experience, but requires big xp investment to open it up fully, therefore you have to be stealthy to get to hacking. Narratively one is also pushed towards stealth, because more experience means hacking which in turn means more details about the world.

I was gonna say, the original Deus Ex messed with my head for the same reason Yahtzee's talking about, which is why I never got very far in it (that, plus forgetting to save my game between levels because I'm used to some degree of autosave). Every time I started the first mission, if I failed to take out a dude stealthily, it felt like a game-over that the game wasn't even courteous enough to treat as such, forcing me to keep going even knowing I had already failed. (See also the respawn feature in BioShock.) I get enough of that from reality, and it wasn't nearly as amusing to roll with it as it was in, say, Fallout 3.

 

[Thanatos2k]

You are crushing my dreams to make a first person match 3 visual novel.

HuniePop is 2/3 of the way there......................

 

[JET1971]

When I play fallout 3 or New Vegas I mix my playstyle up, sometimes I stealth and take out enemies from a distance with a silenced sniper rifle or I will charge right for some run and gun action. Both are equally satisfying. In Skyrim sometimes I go sword and board and others a stealth archer. never has the games told me to choose a style, the tools to make the style up are just there to be used or ignored as I see fit. That's the key to giving playstyle choices, provide the tools and not mention different styles and never force the player to do one style at anytime. With just providing the tools if you choose stealth and alert everyone within 100 miles then that is a consequence for your mistake that feels right, when it's a forced stealth section the consequences never feel right when the mission fails or some other hackneyed consequence.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Who here actually played Far Cry 3 as a shoot em up?

The missions in Far Cry 3 kinda railroad you into stealth or action, there's very little room for choosing. Often missions will be evenly split between The Stealth Bit and The Action Bit (the mission with the beached ships, the mission with the marijuana fields, the mission where you 1) stealthily work your way towards a prisoner and 2) shoot your way back, etc). You only really get to choose how you get to clear the outspots, if you want to clear the outposts. And why wouldn't you? It's the most fun part of the game. The advantage of stealth is that it rewards more XP and also there will be no reinforcements. On the other hand, you can preemptively shoot the alarm/s to eliminate reinforcements in case of a shootout, and halfway through the game I was maxed out on XP so there was no true reward for stealth other than the personal satisfaction of a job skillfully accomplished. I RPG'd the last couple of outposts, because fuck getting around dogs. The bottom line is, I don't think this duality in game design was as bipolar as it could've been. Action felt pretty solid, and I liked how you could blend the two by luring chasers into the forest, breaking lines of sight and continue to take them one-on-one, Rambo style.

 

[StatusNil]

"But even if the game doesn't make that kind of overbearing moral judgment, and beats me over the head with the knowledge that it's entirely up to what I feel like doing and there'll be no consequences either way, it's impossible to make a dual stealth/shooter game where the shooting doesn't feel like the fallback for after you fuck up the stealth."

B-but that's the CORRECT way to do a stealth game, rather than getting "Bzzzz! Game Over!" if you're detected. You done goofed, and now you have to shoot your way out of the goof. At least that's what we all (well, maybe not ALL of us) tried to tell Ubisoft when they had that same separate "play styles" scoring system in Splinter Cell: Blacklist, with an "Assault" shooty option. Dunno if they listened, no news of a new Splinter Cell as of yet. But here's a hoping.

 

[Evonisia]

Sometimes, letting people approach a problem how they want can work, to an extent. Halo 3 would often dump you in front of of a large open area, and say "run wild," leaving it up to you whether you wanted to pick each enemy off with a battle rifle, charge forwards in a vortex of needle rounds and flailing punches, or strafe everything in sight with a vehicle mounted weapon. The crucial point is that the game didn't treat you any differently for taking any one approach; as long as all the enemies all died, it didn't matter how you achieved it.

Often times you didn't even need to kill the enemies in Halo 3. I often enjoy skipping over large portions of some of the levels (especially The Covenant) through strategic use of vehicles, legging it and invisibility, especially on Legendary.

 

[Silent Protagonist]

Glad to hear I am not the only one driven crazy by the "optional" stealth style in so many games. Sometimes I would like have a little fun running and gunning but everything about these types of games insists that is the lesser or even wrong option. Not to mention these games seem to always have some sort of "No Kills the entire game" achievement that essentially punishes you for ever deviating from the stealth if you start off playing that way. Also glad to know I am not the only one who gets some irrational guilt for killing NPCs when the game gives me the option not to, even when they are straight up enemies. I have learned to avoid this type of game unless I really want to do some stealth, and even then I may avoid it because trying to both usually means neither are done particularly well.