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Stealth Genre, where is it?

My favorite genre, I miss it dearly in big games. There's plenty of indie games, though. I kinda hope that Mouse P.I. will have stealth.
There was a spiritual successor to Thief announced not long ago, which I'm looking forwart too.

I make do with the Hitman games for now and every now and again fire up Deus Ex games and Dishonored. These also have immersive sim design, so there's plenty of options that keep the games fresh. Same with Prey.
 
The problem with stealth in games is that it went 2 ways. Extreme which is once youre noticed its instafail. Then theres the extremely modern AAA take of stealth with the yellow red meter and its easier just to shoot or kill the enemy than play stealthy.

We have lost that middle ground of systems base stealth, like your MGS, Thief, Splinter Cell.

The best we have today (and its pretty fucking great) is the new hitman trilogy
 
TintoConCasera said:
If nothing's coming out then why not play the classics? Thief is pretty good and it has a ton of community made missions.
Click to expand...
There's also The Dark Mod.

The Dark Mod - Stealth Gaming in a Gothic Steampunk World | The Dark Mod

THE DARK MOD is a FREE first person stealth game inspired by the Thief series by Looking Glass Studios. Download and play hundreds of missions for free.
www.thedarkmod.com www.thedarkmod.com

And I'm waiting for
To get out of Early Access.

This could be good


But it looks more inspired by System Shock 2 rather than Thief.
 
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At the top of my head games that had stealth in the last many years that I enjoyed/loved in release order new to old:

Outer Worlds 2
AC Shadows
KCD2
Sumerian Six
Indiana Jones
A Plague Tale series
Deathloop
Cyberpunk 2077
Hitman
Desperados 3
Metro Exodus
Spider-Man series
Batman Arkham series
Shadow Tactics Blades of the Shogun
Dishonored series
Deus Ex series
Most first-person horror games
etc.

I am still hoping we're getting the Splinter Cell remake. Not sure what else is releasing this year that has stealth, at least nothing big.
 
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From the big boys, it's all in the 90s/00s, I guess, outside Hitman, which isn't exactly AAA either.

This dude's been making MGS-like games (and other stuff) for a long while, they're pretty minimalistic and simple for the most part but his next one looks to be the biggest yet. Old raw footage, he's going for retro looks usually but that's not how it's gonna look obviously, placeholder block assets:

And yeah lots of indie imm sims where stealth can play a key role like Seven, Gloomwood, RetroSpace, Weird West and Deep State, thank god.

We got a nice streak of Commandos-like games as well, like Shadow Tactics and stuff inspired by its devs who chose to shut down after their success.

I guess stuff like Ready or Not and Dagger Directive count, too.
 
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AAA stealth games died with Star Wars Outlaws

Stormtroopers Fetch GIF by Ubisoft
 
I mean whilst assassins creed has added a load of non stealth crap, I played the entirety of mirage 100% stealth kills…so it can scratch that itch.

Otherwise it's mostly been relegated to elective play styles in big games, like cyberpunk where I played mostly as stealth hacking, and kcd2 etc.
 
OP, i think ur best bet for at least some stealth gameplay is new 007 game, made by hitman series devstudio btw:


Obviously tons of actionpacked sequences gonna be there too, but nowadays we gotta take what we can get.
 
As others have pointed out, its not that it died and more that the formula shifted a lot from the classic Metal Gear, Splinter Cell style, becoming more tactical games or being incorporated into other genres.
 
Can we do one of these threads for horror games too?

I feel like there's way too much focus on about 20 games / series, yet the genre has tons and tons of games in it.

Like I already know what people would recommend but what if we already played those?

This thread is already a success for stealth. I found out about a lot of great new ones. If one is wondering why I don't do it, I'm skittish about it because I don't want to make a bad topic and I never posted a new thread.

I don't want to derail the thread. I'd be grateful if someone made one. 🙏🏻
 
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Too niche sadly, and most are just the same as they've always been as mentioned above, basically pacman ghost style cone vision. I enjoy the Immsim type more than others in the genre, but each has their own appeal. Its far too removed from mainstream appeal with the exception of horror genre implementations, which vary in quality.

The most fun I've had with a stealth game lately was an indie adult game based on exhibitionism. Its made by 1 person I think, but while short was great fun and an impressive improvement over their previous title.

I'm interested in the most recent Styx game, has anyone here had any time with it?
 
Days Gone. The good thing about it, is you can play it stealth or not, completely up to you! It's slow for the first several hours, but ends up being a pretty fantastic experience.
 
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Unless its a game adverting/claiming stealth based gameplay at the core, the genre has just about disappeared.

Maybe if the most basic forms of stealth in games today wasn't just "hide & find" there would probably still be captivating and challenging scenarios being designed but nope. Gotta give people a waypoint, an OBJ list, and 20 hints in a row so they never get lost or think to themselves "how do I get out of this?" or "How can I accomplish X?".

Industry has done everything in its power to bury every element of OSP style gameplay and the only genre left leaving those mechanics open to player expression are things like extraction and mil-sim shooters.
 
Hadoukens said:
Can we do one of these threads for horror games too?

I feel like there's way too much focus on about 20 games / series, yet the genre has tons and tons of games in it.

Like I already know what people would recommend but what if we already played those?

This thread is already a success for stealth. I found out about a lot of great new ones. If one is wondering why I don't do it, I'm skittish about it because I don't want to make a bad topic and I never posted a new thread.

I don't want to derail the thread. I'd be grateful if someone made one. 🙏🏻
Click to expand...
Thread 'Upcoming games you are looking forward to that not many people know about' https://www.neogaf.com/threads/upco...d-to-that-not-many-people-know-about.1681345/

Check out this thread. A few indie horror games are there and AA stuff.
 
Alexios said:
From the big boys, it's all in the 90s/00s, I guess, outside Hitman, which isn't exactly AAA either.

This dude's been making MGS-like games (and other stuff) for a long while, they're pretty minimalistic and simple for the most part but his next one looks to be the biggest yet. Old raw footage, he's going for retro looks usually but that's not how it's gonna look obviously, placeholder block assets:

And yeah lots of indie imm sims where stealth can play a key role like Seven, Gloomwood, RetroSpace, Weird West and Deep State, thank god.

We got a nice streak of Commandos-like games as well, like Shadow Tactics and stuff inspired by its devs who chose to shut down after their success.

I guess stuff like Ready or Not and Dagger Directive count, too.
Click to expand...

This is what that game intends to look more like atm.
 
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Edit: I already posted it, lmao. Forgot about that. Still its better to double post than not to post it at all.

I love the Splinter Cell references.

And that camera which fell down and turned into robot would like totally catch me off guard.
 
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For me, a truth stealth game can't be explicitly linear or hand-holdy. Each level should be like a puzzle you need work out. Playing it over and over again to learn how to perfect your run through trial and error. Hitman: World of Assassination is the only recent game that perfects that for me, and it's great because you can tailor how hardcore you want the stealth mechanics to be.

The first thing to disable is that terrible Detective Mode and any hint pop-ups.

Indiana Jones is a good one to scratch the itch too.

Other than that, most of the other ones I know of are in the indie scene or from decades back (Thief, Deus Ex).
 
Stealth games as a concept have reached an impasse. Realistic stealth is no fun, and gamey stealth is so ubiquitous we all kinda shrug when we see it. Vision cones, knee high invisibility grass. Camera shooting. To go beyond that is very expensive. Kojima got about as close as you can get to emergent gameplay stealth, but the realism:fun-factor ratio just rains on the parade at the logical conclusion of every gameplay concept.

I think a reimagining of the original Splinter Cell, where you could use emergent gameplay on a smaller scale to get through rooms is probably the only way to go. I don't think it sells enough to justify the development costs. Hitman pulls it off somehow without being casual at all, so who knows. Game is better than ever, and at least on the outside seems to be doing well for the developers.

How have more publishers not taken note of how well Hitman has done and how seriously hardcore it is? It's the perfect example of modern iterations of games done right.
 
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