2012 was the year I found out game journalists hate stealth games

So, I listen to a LOT of different gaming podcasts, so I got to hear a ton of people give their opinions on two games this year, Mark of the Ninja, and Dishonored.

And almost without exception I would hear the exact same phrases "I normally hate stealth games but..." or "This was the game that actually made me not hate stealth games."

Now, I love stealth games. The Thief series is in the running for one of my favorite gaming franchises of all time. So finding out that apparently EVERYONE hates stealth games was pretty goddamn mindblowing to me.

I dunno. Am I alone in this?

P.S. Dishonored was everything I wanted a modern Thief game to be. I think the Thief 4 team is going to have their work cut out for them trying to surpass it.

TO be perfectly honest, I've heard a lot of game reviewers and journalists lately basically saying they hate every kind of genre.

Just today most people on teh weekend confirmed podcast were like "I hate stragety games but Xcom made me like a strategy game"

I always wondered who the idiots are who like the "press x to win" videogames but, apparently it's journalists. I guess that's why they keep making them.

There's some genre's that just don't get the credit they often deserve, MMO's and Stealth games being just two of them.
 
And sorry, can't resist posting this.
 

They obviously don't hate stealth games if they like Mark of the Ninja and Dishonored. They just hate shitty stealth games.

@panvixyl said:

They just hate shitty stealth games.

As much as I want to correct you on that...I dont have any evidence to do so.

I love stealth games, except I admit it takes a different line of thinking to accept the "quarks" that come from the games as they end up too hard if you base things entirely on reality.

It is an infant game genre?

@Akyho: Stealth games have been around for a while, but they've always been sort of niche compared to stuff like CoD. I could accept the line of thinking that only now are the kinks truly being ironed out after lots of trial and error.

And as someone who loves stealth games too (Metal Gear Solid onwards = my favorite series) I think both of us us can admit that there has been some jank-ass shit in the genre.

That's true of any genre though.

@panvixyl:

They are all Janky and scale of shittyness is relative.

What's is universal shit stealth and that is Vampire Rain.

I think a lot of people were tired of waiting in shadows with imprecise, unclear line of sight/noise/etc mechanics that would require a lot of trial and error, and a bunch of waiting and doing little in between. That describes the majority of my experience with early Splinter Cell games, and a Thief game I tried once.

I'm not discounting the things those games did right, or claiming that the above described aspects of those games were all there was to them, but they were the cons to many people that outweighed the pros.

You will find that most people who review games actively tend to dislike any genre of game that requires patience. This is primarily because their usual style of playing is to sit down for long sessions just to plow through all the content in as short amount of time as possible so they can get on with the review.

I think its that peoples main experiences with stealth are stealh seqeunces from action games and because they are almost always shitty and unwanted they fell stealth games are shitty and not what they want. Also lack of patienceis another hurdle for reviews who just want to plow through it and gamers.

There just aren't many great stealth games coming out regularly so it's easy to not consider it a favourite genre. Same thing goes for strategy video games.

@panvixyl said:

They obviously don't hate stealth games if they like Mark of the Ninja and Dishonored. They just hate shitty stealth games.

Dishonored is not the best stealth game by far.

@JazGalaxy said:

TO be perfectly honest, I've heard a lot of game reviewers and journalists lately basically saying they hate every kind of genre.

Just today most people on teh weekend confirmed podcast were like "I hate stragety games but Xcom made me like a strategy game"

I always wondered who the idiots are who like the "press x to win" videogames but, apparently it's journalists. I guess that's why they keep making them.

I like "Press X to Win" games! And strategy games! And stealth games! Don't like sports games though... maybe if I could press X to win.

if someone writes about games it does not make them a journalist.

I think that´s because most of them are jaded beyond redemption. It´s a perfectly normal thing to be if you´ve played hundreds if not thousands of games in your life.

Yeah, and the "press x to win" argument, as silly as it sounds, it holds some amount of truth. There are things about games, like handholding, that a journalist will appreciate in a different way, just because games are his or her "work". So, at a point, if a game comes along and makes that "work" easier- of course they´re all for it. Stealth games used to be quite the opposite of that. I loved Splinter Cell and Thief, but I can also imagine hating parts of those games if I had to play them on a damn schedule.

So, in short- there are genres that are just more "reviewer friendly" than others. And the most reviewer friendly games tend to be a little on the simple side. Not a knock against reviewers, thats just the way things are.

Oh and there are quite a lot of bad stealth games or games with bad stealth sections. *Ahem* Beyond Good and Evil *Cough*

I hate stealth games , yet I liked Dishonored. I can see their point

The hate comes from stealth sections in games that shouldn't have them.

There's nothing inherently bad about stealth in games but it takes a certain kind of talented developer to make it gratifying to wait around. It's just not fun to lose 40 minutes of sneaking to poorly programmed AI or unresponsive controls.

I feel like Thief got stealth right the very first time and no one has even gotten close. It gave you open level design to pick your own approach. You also get plenty of tools and gadgets to use for both stealth and offensives purposes. Dishonored has been one of the only games thats been designed like this and its a fucking shame.
If you look at a game like Assassin's Creed 3 its no wonder why they dislike stealth in video games.

@Will_M said:

I feel like Thief got stealth right the very first time and no one has even gotten close. It gave you open level design to pick your own approach. You also get plenty of tools and gadgets to use for both stealth and offensives purposes. Dishonored has been one of the only games thats been designed like this and its a fucking shame. If you look at a game like Assassin's Creed 3 its no wonder why they dislike stealth in video games.

Amen to that. I never realized how fucking awful the stealth was in the Assassin's Creed Franchise until AC3. I'm meant to be playing as master assassins but I can't do some of the most basic shit that even a normal person could do.

@Superfriend said:

I think that´s because most of them are jaded beyond redemption. It´s a perfectly normal thing to be if you´ve played hundreds if not thousands of games in your life.

Yeah, and the "press x to win" argument, as silly as it sounds, it holds some amount of truth. There are things about games, like handholding, that a journalist will appreciate in a different way, just because games are his or her "work". So, at a point, if a game comes along and makes that "work" easier- of course they´re all for it. Stealth games used to be quite the opposite of that. I loved Splinter Cell and Thief, but I can also imagine hating parts of those games if I had to play them on a damn schedule.

So, in short- there are genres that are just more "reviewer friendly" than others. And the most reviewer friendly games tend to be a little on the simple side. Not a knock against reviewers, thats just the way things are.

Oh and there are quite a lot of bad stealth games or games with bad stealth sections. *Ahem* Beyond Good and Evil *Cough*

I also think they just play too many games.

I always think it's nuts when people like the Giant Bomb staff say "I bought that game. Still have it sitting at home unwrapped!" Or "I bought 3 copies of that game!"

If the world of emulation teaches anything, it's that when you have access to a sizeable number of games, your patience for any one game goes down exponentially.

@Will_M said:

I feel like Thief got stealth right the very first time and no one has even gotten close. It gave you open level design to pick your own approach. You also get plenty of tools and gadgets to use for both stealth and offensives purposes. Dishonored has been one of the only games thats been designed like this and its a fucking shame.
If you look at a game like Assassin's Creed 3 its no wonder why they dislike stealth in video games.

The original Tenchu, for PS1, in my opinion, nailed Stealth on it's first entry as well.

The main thing I think they got right is to have a fully featured and nuanced combat system in the game. You could play it as a brawling game if you wanted to, and fight every single badguy, but because every badguy is roughly as powerful as you are, that would be really, really hard.

It makes sneaking necessary and fun, but if you blow an assasination, you can still fight your way out of it if you have to.

Plus it gives you, as you said, a TON of tools to manipulate your environment such as smoke bombs, caltrops, a reed to breathe underwater undetected, etc.

It's a shame because it seems with how reviewers handle stealth games are going to effect the genre moving forward, we're already seeing more of a push towards action-stealth, and with the implementation of what I consider hand-holding features like indicators for every little nuance of the stealth the games are just becoming less and less meaningful.  
 
I personally think Mark of the Ninja is one of the worst games to hold the stealth label, and Dishonored, while amazing in almost every other regard, could have given the players more pure stealth options on top of the large variety of combat oriented abilities.

I only hate stealth games when being discovered or killing someone results in an instant fail. That's not fun, especially when the game systems don't make it clear why you were spotted. I remember playing the first Splinter Cell and thinking 'Why give me this bad ass gun if I'm going to automatically fail the mission if I shoot anyone?' It was just dumb. By all means make it very hard to fight enemies like in the early Tenchu games, but don't make me completely unable to fight.

Like many others have said, stealth is just a thing that is fucked up more consistently than nearly anything else in video games. Whether it's a poorly-conceived stealth section in a game that, otherwise, demands no such thing, or a game that revolves entirely around stealth where your character is simply assumed to be a stealth master but you as a player are left fumbling around like a fool. The early Splinter Cell games, for example. It's a genre that's very easy to get mishandle, and it asks a lot of players.

@panvixyl said:

They obviously don't hate stealth games if they like Mark of the Ninja and Dishonored. They just hate shitty stealth games.

I think many people dislike "traditional" stealth games where one misstep leads to a complete fail-state and you get reset back to the beginning of the stealth gauntlet. That is frustrating for many people. When you think about how game reviewers and critics have to play games to make their living it makes sense they would not enjoy a traditional stealth game.

It's good for everyone that the stealth mechanic in games got an overhaul over the last few years.

@The_Nubster said:

Like many others have said, stealth is just a thing that is fucked up more consistently than nearly anything else in video games. Whether it's a poorly-conceived stealth section in a game that, otherwise, demands no such thing, or a game that revolves entirely around stealth where your character is simply assumed to be a stealth master but you as a player are left fumbling around like a fool. The early Splinter Cell games, for example. It's a genre that's very easy to get mishandle, and it asks a lot of players.

To be fair, I think a big problem with splinter Cell was the setting. By trying to make it super militaristic and realistic, they created a scenario where it doesn't make sense for the character to be able to fight their way out of trouble.

I think the first sin of making a stealth game, probably, is trying to make it in any way realistic.

I liked Mark of the Ninja. Dishonored was okay but I think it's getting more credit than it deserves just because it's a new IP.

I don't know where the dislike of old stealth games came from, and I sure as hell don't get it. Splinter Cell and Chaos Theory are two of my favorite games. I was under the impression that they were generally well liked but I guess I was wrong.

@Brendan said:

I think a lot of people were tired of waiting in shadows with imprecise, unclear line of sight/noise/etc mechanics that would require a lot of trial and error, and a bunch of waiting and doing little in between. That describes the majority of my experience with early Splinter Cell games, and a Thief game I tried once.

Thief is in no way unclear about your sight. There's a light gem right in the middle if your interface. The darker it is, the more hidden you are, the closer you can get to an enemy before you are seen. And everything contributes to the feedback from that light gem. The darkness you are standing in. If you're crouched or not. How fast you're moving. If you're leaning out. Even whether you have your weapons out or not.

It's the most simple, straightforward method of letting the player know just how hidden they are outside of games like Mark of the Ninja or Chronicles of Riddick. And those games only have two setting, Hidden, and Not Hidden. Thief has a wide range of nuance to just how hidden you can be at a given time.

A Light Gem is pretty much the only mechanic I would like to see added to Dishonored honestly. Well, that and some kind of indicator every time someone dies, you get spotted, or a body is found in the level you're in.

@Will_M said:

I feel like Thief got stealth right the very first time and no one has even gotten close. It gave you open level design to pick your own approach. You also get plenty of tools and gadgets to use for both stealth and offensives purposes. Dishonored has been one of the only games thats been designed like this and its a fucking shame. If you look at a game like Assassin's Creed 3 its no wonder why they dislike stealth in video games.

I couldn't agree more. It's always been kind of infuriating to me that the only games to get Stealth right were some of the first ones ever made, and everything that came after managed to screw it up somehow.

I love just about everything about the Assassin's Creed series, and there are tons of elements that I'd love to see in a Thief series(primarily the parkour). But the one thing Assassin's Creed has always done terribly is the Stealth. Stealth with zero ability to hide in the shadows is no stealth at all my friend. When stealth just boils down to making sure you keep an object between you and the guards, that's not really stealth, that's Pac-man.

@tourgen said:

I think many people dislike "traditional" stealth games where one misstep leads to a complete fail-state and you get reset back to the beginning of the stealth gauntlet.

I actually have zero problem with that type of stealh gameplay provided there is quicksaving. I have absolutely no compunction against save-scumming my way through Thief or Dishonored and, frankly, I love playing that way.

Add a special hardcore setting for people who don't want to play that way. But leave me to do it how I want.

I think more than people hate stealth games, they hate stealth sections shoe-horned into games where it doesn't belong.

There's some genre's that just don't get the credit they often deserve, MMO's and Stealth games being just two of them.
 
And sorry, can't resist posting this.
 

Smart asses who have to post: are you the only one? NO OBVIOUSLY LOL

^ Seriously shut the hell up. Just don't post in the thread. What are you contributing? Get over yourselves.

Anyways I'm very much with you on being surprised at the hate for stealth. If you're a Thief fan I'm a bit surprised you think Dishonored is where you want Thief to go. Not that I didn't like it but it's just a very different type of game to me.

But anyways, I guess I just have very different tastes. I can actually quite like trial in error (loved it in the old Hitman games, love it in Stuntman for example) and I always thought Splinter Cell gave you plenty of information and it was sure easy to just go in the dark shadows and stay hidden.

It's a shame all stealth is becoming line of sight style cover stealth. I quite liked the way it was going with dark vs light, even if it could be a bit silly. Chaos Theory is one of the best games ever made to me.

@DarthEnder said:

@Brendan said:

I think a lot of people were tired of waiting in shadows with imprecise, unclear line of sight/noise/etc mechanics that would require a lot of trial and error, and a bunch of waiting and doing little in between. That describes the majority of my experience with early Splinter Cell games, and a Thief game I tried once.

Thief is in no way unclear about your sight. There's a light gem right in the middle if your interface. The darker it is, the more hidden you are, the closer you can get to an enemy before you are seen. And everything contributes to the feedback from that light gem. The darkness you are standing in. If you're crouched or not. How fast you're moving. If you're leaning out. Even whether you have your weapons out or not.

It's the most simple, straightforward method of letting the player know just how hidden they are outside of games like Mark of the Ninja or Chronicles of Riddick. And those games only have two setting, Hidden, and Not Hidden. Thief has a wide range of nuance to just how hidden you can be at a given time.

Agreed with you here about this system not being broken. The method in Splinter Cell wasn't either. It's actually qutie good and as you say gives some nice variety instead of simply "Spotted" or "not spotted" or something like the silly Dishonored system where you can be obviously seen but it just takes a while for them to realize it's you.

I hope we get a stealth game with stealth of that type and people don't see it as a broken system because it's really not at all.

But have you played Splinter Cell OP? Especially Chaos Theory? You say no other games have gotten stealth of that type right and Chaos Theory certainly did.

I can't comprehend anyone not liking Thief. At least Thief 2. That game is perfect.

Yea was a little surprised to hear how much they hate it on the podcast, stealth is one of my favorite things to do in games but I'd understand if they meant for games that don't necessarily need stealth in them.

@ArtisanBreads said:

Anyways I'm very much with you on being surprised at the hate for stealth. If you're a Thief fan I'm a bit surprised you think Dishonored is where you want Thief to go. Not that I didn't like it but it's just a very different type of game to me.

You and I must see it very differently then because to me, Dishonored is EXACTLY the same type of game as Thief. It's closer to Thief 1 and 2 than Thief DS was. Almost everything I like about Thief is in Dishonored.

And the stuff that's new, like mid-mission quests, is stuff Thief should have in the future. Even the Rune powers are exactly the kind of thing I would have expected Garrett to be able to do with his Glyphs(instead of the really lame stuff they do in DS).

As I said before, the only thing Dishonored is really missing is the nuanced light and shadow interactions that the Thief games have.

I think if you actually asked them about any genre (which is to say variety of gameplay) they would say they don't like it. The only thing they like or don't like is themes (horror, scifi, crime, post-apocalypse, fantasy, cyberpunk). Certain staff members here don't like shooters, RPGs, strategy, adventure, character action, racing, fighting unless it has a theme they like. You could go here's a scifi action-adventure game with solid mechanics and here's a horror action-adventure with bad mechanics and the latter would get praised purely on theme rather than quality of gameplay within its genre. And that's sad.

I always liked the splinter cell games, guess I liked the realism of you getting shot more than once, you actually die. Don't know if I were to go back and play those games if they would still hold up or not.