I have a gripe with games that combine stealth and action.

[Zhukov]

By now I think that games mixing action with stealth can safely be called a trend, even if it's just a smallish trend. Recent examples include:

- Dishonored
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
- Assassin Creed series.
- Batman Arkham Thing
- Far Cry 3
- Splinter Cell: Conviction (and also that new one if the previews are anything to go by.)
- Hitman Absolution (Kinda. It encourages stealth, but you can still Rambo it if you want.)
- Crysis series. (Although I'm reluctant to grace "invisibility mode lol" with the term "stealth".)
- Call of Duty 4 and beyond (Okay, now I'm really stretching. But still, those scripted sequences are clearly meant to make you feel stealthy.)

I'm not quite sure what has brought this about. Perhaps action game developers are looking to stave off staleness by borrowing from other genres. Perhaps there are a ton of developers who really want to make a stealth game but can't justify it to the marketing department, so they make a hybrid instead.

Thing is, it doesn't seem to have quite worked.

I find that the action options just make the stealth elements an irrelevant waste of time. You could scope out the area, plan your route and make your way silently through, distracting enemies where possible, executing silent takedowns and concealing any evidence of your passing as you go. Or you could just walk in the front door and shoot everyone in the face. Stealth and avoidance are what someone does when brute force isn't an option. When brute force is an option the only reason to be sneaky is for style points or, in some cases, because you're going for your pacifist run.

On the other side, the stealth elements tend to overpower the action options. The player always gets to see their enemies first. The AI has to be rendered nigh-retarded and nearly blind. Enemies are usually isolated or exposed so that they can be picked of one-by-one.

Combining action and stealth sounds great on paper. I like stealth games (although I've never played a truly great one, and yes I've played the Thief games) and I like action games. Mixing them together should be like the chocolate and peanut butter thing. Except it kind of isn't. It's more like putting ice cream in my seafood spaghetti.

 

[ClockworkUniverse]

I find that the action options just make the stealth elements an irrelevant waste of time. You could scope out the area, plan your route and make your way silently through, distracting enemies where possible, executing silent takedowns and concealing any evidence of your passing as you go. Or you could just walk in the front door and shoot everyone in the face. Stealth and avoidance are what someone does when brute force isn't an option. When brute force is an option the only reason to be sneaky is for style points or, in some cases, because you're going for your pacifist run.

I liked how Human Revolution handled it. Making stealth your first choice is directly incentivized by the XP system. Fighting is quite simply not very rewarding.

 

[Zhukov]

Ok. Try going action in one of the Arkham games stealth sections. Just fucking try it. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Done?

See, that game made the right move of blending the two together like chocolate and strawberry ice-cream, to get food wise. It doesn't remove the necessity of one style, it makes both relevant.

That's because that game didn't combine them. It just alternated between them.

Enemies have guns? Stealth section.
Enemies have all mysteriously left their previously numerous guns at home and have decided to engage in fisticuffs instead? Action section.

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

I agree with the above, Arkham Asylum and City both made stealth incredibly fun and necessary at points. The stealth made you feel incredibly powerful, whilst still being somewhat vulnerable due to your bullet weakness.


With some of the other games you mentioned, stealth makes it much easier if you play on the harder difficulties (ie Playing on Give me Deus Ex difficulty in Human Revolution made the game really fucking hard if you tried to go guns blazing).

I do agree though, a bad blend of stealth and action just feels wrong, especially if you fuck up the stealth but can dispatch the enemies with ease.

 

[The Madman]

I like em, though truth be told I would prefer a pure stealth experience over some form of hybrid. Still I always enjoy it when a game gives me gameplay options, especially if those gameplay options are matched by a suitably free-form environment to use them in.

The best part of games like the original Crysis or Dishonored in my mind is having the ability to evaluate your situation and then decide how you'll be acting from there, whether you'll be playing things predator style or going in like Charlie Sheen doped up on tiger blood and thirsty for destruction:


Guess it's just the possibility of choice that gets me, that and the pure ridiculous fun that a game like the above can offer when compared the the stagnancy of your typical run & gun scripted corridor shooter.

 

[Zhukov]

I agree with the above, Arkham Asylum and City both made stealth incredibly fun and necessary at points. The stealth made you feel incredibly powerful, whilst still being somewhat vulnerable due to your bullet weakness.

Yeeeaaah... I thoroughly enjoyed the punch-ups in the Arkham games, but I have zero respect for their stealth elements.

Any stealth game that involves being able to hit one button to be instantly transported to an invisible hiding place is never going to be more than Baby's First Stealth Adventure.

(ie Playing on Give me Deus Ex difficulty in Human Revolution made the game really fucking hard if you tried to go guns blazing).

No, it really, really didn't.

I've only ever played that gave on the "Give Me Deus Ex" difficulty, and the gunplay was not hard. Every now and then I would get bored with the glacial pacing of the stealth, save the game, then go on a quick cathartic rampage before loading the save. I never encountered any difficulties.

I realise difficulty is a relative thing, but I'm generally not much good at games. If I can do it, then basically anyone who has played games for more than a year or so should be able to do it.

 

[Smooth Operator]

That would be equal to claiming more then one weapon makes all others an irrelevant waste of time, or more then one class, or more then one character, ...

I understand if you feel that way and we that is completely up to you, but some of us like the flexibility.

 

[lapan]

I thought this would be about Metal Gear Rising, since that also combines both elements. The stealth in that game is more of a wink back at the original series and not really necessary to complete the game though.

 

[Dryk]

I played Dishonored both ways and I found doing it straight up killing to be a lot more boring

 

[Zhukov]

That would be equal to claiming more then one weapon makes all others an irrelevant waste of time, or more then one class, or more then one character, ...

I understand if you feel that way and we that is completely up to you, but some of us like the flexibility.

Presumably different weapons would be better for different situations, or the more powerful weapons would have limited ammo or something.

Imagine if you had a weapons that auto-killed anything in sight and had endless ammo. It would render the others irrelevant. That is what the availability of action is to stealth.

Same goes for characters and classes.

 

[Auron]

Options are good, I like options what's wrong with not being limited?

I find that the action options just make the stealth elements an irrelevant waste of time.

So you don't enjoy stealth, don't do it. You don't have to play maximum efficiency every game especially in single player games.

Hell you can play every TES game by stealthing by the enemies or murdering every single thing on sight if you want, this is one of the things people love about it. You can play Fallout without hurting a single person the entire game stealthing smooth talking or you can just destroy everything on sight, usually and especially in most games you mentioned killing everything is actually harder at least on a decent difficulty level.

A bad trend I've been noticing is that normal is easy and easy is retarded as of late. The latest Hitman's a great example hardest and purist are the only decent modes, in fact try going all Rambo on purist while you're at it, not sure you're going to make it.

 

[King Billi]

It's good to have a change of pace every now and then, usually a standard action game will only offer this in the form of a slightly different kind of action like a vehicle or turret section or as you already pointed out with a heavily scripted set pieces usually found in Call of Duty. Now isn't a lack of variety and innovation one of the biggest comlaints about Call of Duty?

The point is better games tend to offer some kind of variety in their mechanics to offer some juxtaposition so you're not just doing the same damn task over and over again.

Uncharted has puzzles and climbing to offset its shooting and fighting.

Mass Effect has character interaction and conversation trees to offset its standard shooter action.

Portal 2 has humour to offset its puzzles.

And the games you've listed offer stealth to offset their action sections... depending upon the game some of them offer even more options.

Would Arkham Asylum have been a better game if it scrapped stealth entirely and was a straight up brawler from start to finish?

 

[Zhukov]

Options are good, I like options what's wrong with not being limited?

I find that the action options just make the stealth elements an irrelevant waste of time.

So you don't enjoy stealth, don't do it. You don't have to play maximum efficiency every game especially in single player games.

Except I do like stealth. I said so right there in the OP.

However, I thought the idea of stealth is that you avoid or pick off enemies because you're not a some kind of superhero who can just strike them down with a stern glance.

Sneaking about In a game where you can just murder everything front on isn't being stealthy, it's just playing with your food.

"Oh no, I must remain concealed from that passing guard! If I'm not careful he will see me and then he will... umm... fall before my effortless attack. Huh. Why am I hiding from him again?"

Might as well play an action game with God Mode turned on.

 

[Altefforr]

Hell you can play every TES game by stealthing by the enemies or murdering every single thing on sight if you want, this is one of the things people love about it.

Except in IV, and V. Immortal NPC's are awesome, right?

Anyways, I haven't played too many stealth games; the only one being Splinter Cell:Stealth Action Redefined (A very, very, good game). I found with SC:SAR, you would generally fail the mission objectives, or just get killed if you didn't do something properly. You could easily sneak past a first guard, kill everyone else, and then as you're sneaking past the last grouping have an alarm go off because the very first guard found all your bodies piled in a corner while on his rounds.

There were plenty of options, but of course there were times where it would be extremely difficult or plain stupid to go Charlie Sheen on them all; either because you would run out of ammunition for later in the mission, or you'd attract too many enemies.

At least it's not like "sneaking" in Skyrim. "Huh? Guess it was nothing..."

 

[Sir Pootis]

The point of this kind of gameplay is to privide an alternative to stealth. Many people are going to get caught at some point, and the action counteracts this. A good stealth game, like Batman: AC or Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker find a balance, but a bad stealth game doesen't, making the stealth feel like an afterthought. To quote an above poster:

Ok. Try going action in one of the Arkham games stealth sections. Just fucking try it. Go ahead, I'll wait.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Imagine if you had a weapons that auto-killed anything in sight and had endless ammo. It would render the others irrelevant. That is what the availability of action is to stealth.

No it's actually the difference between rifle and shotgun, different tool for a different approach, pick and choose your flavor.

 

[lechat]

the latest hitman done a decent job
you could run through the average stage in 5 minuets mowing down anything that moved but you would earn very little xp and by the final stages odds are you'd be having a really bad time

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

OT: I think a fewof those games you listed actually handle the interplay between stealth and action fairly well, in that the stealth is necessary because the main character is quite vulnerable, but the combat is always present as an alternative, whether unified or segregated from the stealth elements.

A good example is Arkham Asylum, where the game is neatly segregated between unarmed punch-ups where Batman is a lethal storm of compound fractures and the highly armed predator sections where he'll get taken down in two bursts from a rifle, making the stealth and combat equally mandatory depending on what situation you were in. In that case, the developers intentionally didn't try to mix the two elements like most games do, instead preferring to make the two halves of the game equally entertaining.

Games that fully merge stealth and combat, like Dishonored and DX:HR, impress me less because I always, always end up stealthing for the majority of it. Call me cautious, but it seems silly to fight through an area when it's possible to be patient and get through without taking damage. However, those two games specifically did a good job of keeping the combat a functional option while also not making it an overpowering bludgeon that makes the stealth redundant - your health is very low in both Dishonored and DX:HR, and the enemy numbers are sometimes far too large to attack head-on, meaning that most "combat" playthroughs end up being an entertaining hybrid, where you stealth until you're in a good position to fight, or fight and then flee before being overwhelmed.

So I think the key is how good the balance is between the usefulness of the stealth and the usefulness of the action. I agree completely that if the action is simpler and easier, the stealth becomes vestigial, and I can pick two games off your list that I hate for that reason - Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell: Conviction. The first Splinter Cell games were pure stealth, in that while gunplay was possible, it was generally an awful idea. Conviction through that out the fucking window, and I found myself barely using stealth at all when I played through it. I just stabbed a guy, used the "kill every other guy in the room" power, then kept walking. It wasn't a stealth title at all. The game actively punished you for avoiding enemies, which is an idiotic decision for a stealth title.

Assassin's Creed had the same problem. At the end of the first game, after eight or so hours of blending into the crowd and being sneaky, you are inexplicably thrust into a 1v20 fight against an army of crusaders. You can only win this fight by parrying constantly and counterattacking until all of them are dead. It was absurd. The subsequent games made it even worse by increasing the frequency of the combat encounters to the point where actually being sneaky was totally retarded - you were better off charging in and killing fifty or so guys with counterattacks. The few missions where stealth was an option, it was mandatory - in that you would instantly fail if you were seen, which was more fucking annoying than anything else, because most of the enjoyment of Assassin's Creed's stealth system was escaping enemies after being detected. The most fun I had in the first game was the escape sequence after assassinating the target, where you had to get away back into the city and hide.

In general, though, while I think action-stealth is a difficult thing to balance (like action-horror) it's definitely possible. Some of the games on your list do it very well and some fail at it completely. The key is making both elements of the game useful, which can be accomplished in a number of ways - less health and ammo makes constant combat less appealing, and more intelligent AI or specific mechanisms to break players out of stealth make the combat difficult to consistently avoid. Ideally you'd combine this with a checkpoint system, to stop me from doing what I did in Dishonored - simply reloading the game every time I was discovered, instead of fighting or fleeing and hiding as the game developers probably thought I'd do.

Yeeeaaah... I thoroughly enjoyed the punch-ups in the Arkham games, but I have zero respect for their stealth elements.

Any stealth game that involves being able to hit one button to be instantly transported to an invisible hiding place is never going to be more than Baby's First Stealth Adventure.

The later sections of the game - and all of it on higher difficulties - booby-trap the gargoyles, making them temporary havens at best. This necessicates vastly more ground movement, which is riskier and more interesting.

Also, the stealth challenge missions recognise that the easiest thing to do in a stealth sequence is to eliminate all the guys in the room, so they set up three specific challenges you have to meet - like doing a takedown through a window or wall, or leaving the jammer guy awake till the end - that add difficulty.

Just throwin' that out there.

No, it really, really didn't.

I've only ever played that gave on the "Give Me Deus Ex" difficulty, and the gunplay was not hard. Every now and then I would get bored with the glacial pacing of the stealth, save the game, then go on a quick cathartic rampage before loading the save. I never encountered any difficulties.

What you'll find if you did an entirely-combat playthrough is that the game is actually very miserly in terms of ammunition, so while the occasional gun-rampage doesn't hurt, if you use it as your sole tactic you very quickly run out of bullets.

 

[Ghaleon640]

I've finally started playing Riddick escape from butcher bay, and for that, stealth is pretty important. I mean, it's a stealth game. It likes to take away your guns, or quite simply out-gun you. It has its fair share of action, and I'd say it was blended really well if the stealth wasn't a bit too difficult sometimes. (I'm new to stealth but man it can be frustrating.)

Yes, I'm talking about a game from 2004 since it was attatched to the other riddick game, which is also old.

I'm cheap, what can I say?