This is somewhat true in Dishonored, but not really Deus Ex. Considering you can eat a few protein bars, turn invisible and run through levels.
And it’s kind of hard to say no one was there when a bunch of dudes wake up in a closet cause I thew their unconscious bodies in there.
What it really boils down to is that I am frustrated by the fact that I am penalized for wanting to use the entire sandbox of the game. Dishonored has some really cool things going for it. For example I can summon a devouring swarm outside a door place a landmine on one of the rats and open the door into a room of guards and let chaos ensue, but the game actively tries to stop me from doing that. Instead I am relegated to teleporting across the stage turning the game into a point and click adventure with no actual adventure.
Haven’t played DX:HR, so I’m not sure what to say about that. I do agree though that stealth games should give greater rewards for not interacting with enemies in any way, shape or form than by simply taking them down non-lethally without being seen.
Goddammit man Viper killed my pad. I cant do seismo chains I cant wave dash without getting random super-jumps, I cant jump up-forward or up-back without exaggerating the fuck out of the motion. NONE of my diagonals are responsive except my :db: sighs this is not what i need right now. I guess it was bound to happen since I pratice seismo chains for like 30-40 mins each day on top of other training room stuff but damn this pad is barely a year old. She’s fucking lucky I <3 her.
Seen it a few mins ago. Sucks they shitted on his meter build but its all good. Hazama got some new intresting looking tools and that command grab super is ill.
My favorite stealth game of all time is Splinter Cell Chaos Theory because you are free to play the game as you see fit. If you want to go lethal go lethal, if you want to play stealth play stealth. At the end of every stage you are graded, but you aren’t deprived XP (there isn’t any) like Deus Ex, and you don’t get a bad ending for killing enemies. If you want to go for a high score by being fast and stealthy, go for it.
That and the co op was god like. I have no idea why they never brought it back in a similar fashion to Chaos Theory.
I was on Dustloop WAY before SRK man, I mostly lurk cause I have nothing to say. BB was the first FG I got into and that was right after CS1 came out I found DL cause of facing an Unlimited Arakune and dieing to the magical nutsack super
I only played the first Splinter Cell game on original Xbox.
I tried to open a door on either the first or second level. Even though it was a regular door, it opening towards me, slammed and pressed me against the wall, and killed me.
Never touched another one since.
The way you described it, it seems like SC:CT is really a sandbox game - just the point system is based on stealth. I guess that’s one way to do it, but defining rules and then not enforcing them is about the same as having no rules at all - and games are all about rules.
You aren’t discouraged from killing enemies. Receiving less points isn’t discouragement, losing points is though so most games don’t do any discouragement at all (no points and less points is NOT discouragement, stealth gives you a BONUS which is just extra on top of what you’d get normally). You can do a lethal takedown because… 1) maybe you’re doing a lethal playthrough 2) you felt that it was appropriate for the enemy to suffer that way 3) the game lets you do it 4) roleplaying. You are given the option because, why not? None of the things you’ve mentioned actually prove as to why the moves shouldn’t be there. Your choices have consequences, if you use moves that increase your chaos and you get the bad ending, they were ultimately the result of your actions. This is not that fake ass Mass Effect choice system where your paragon and renegade choices mean fuck all because at the end of the day you will still get the same results regardless of how you played the game (getting the same results despite killing off more than half of your crew is as crappy as it gets).
The sandbox element isn’t from “OH HEY LET ME JUST USE ALL THESE ABILITIES, WHEEEE!” it comes from “Hmmm, I am doing x-style playthrough, these x-style weapons and these x-style talents would make this easier, but perhaps there’s other ways to approach. Alright, so I know Area-Z has a manhole that leads to Room-ZZ where my objective is, this means that I don’t need these X-Stuff for this, and instead I can bring these R-Stuff which will make traversing through the underground area easier”. Alternatively you can do something like “Okay, I am going to take the ground path and go from Area-z to Area-ZY and I won’t kill anyone in between. Since I won’t be alerting anyone, I will prepare ahead so the guards think I am supposed to be there and I won’t raise any alarms. I however will be assassinating the target, but there are cameras where the target is so I should bring something to disable them. Killing my target however, will raise a few alarms, disabling the cameras will also get the security staff to become alert so I should also plan an escape route. I can’t bring any firearms through the front door, but maybe I can sneak one in through the servant’s quarters. Aha! I can use the manhole in the Room-ZZ to come out undetected in Area-Z!”. Apply this to every stage in these games and you can probably do a dozen playthroughs and still come up with new ways to do stuff.
The rewards/penalties are very much NOT failings of anything just how getting less points/losing points for completing a stage slowly is a shortcoming with a game. It is simply the game giving you a set of rules, but also allowing you to not fully follow the rules and punishing you accordingly (where the game punishes you with failure/death if your health reaches 0, this probably being the most common rule in 99.9% of games). The game will let you keep breaking the rules however you want as long as you’re willing to accept the consequences and the rules changing accordingly to you breaking said rules, and if you’re not really willing to do it because you want to have your cake and eat it too the game doesn’t care either. These games DO have actual choices with consequences (you chose who lives and who dies, if they live or die, when they live, how they live or die, you even chose if you get to interact with anything or anyone, you don’t even have to acknowledge their existence), the choices and consequences might be limited (this is more of a time/resource problem more than anything) but they are there.
Do you not like your games having actual consequences? Do you not like your actions in the game to actually have some weight and shape how the world reacts to the events taking place (where you are the very reason for the chaos?) If you don’t like these things, then you’re looking at the wrong games (and possibly for the wrong reasons). And it’s not just these new games recently, any proper stealth-oriented game since the beginning of gaming functions similarly to this. Many of the games that do this right make sure to reflect your choices by changing the world/how you interact with the world.
Why do you even care if you get more points or not? Are you playing the game for points and nothing else? If so then I can see the issue but otherwise why aren’t you just playing these games how you want? The rewards are secondary to the experience you craft.
That’s the problem with a lot of sandbox games, is that there aren’t any rules. They’re just checklists of stuff you can do and that’s it.
Unconscious enemies don’t wake up unless another guard wakes them up. They’re as good as dead otherwise.
Invisibility is not as simple as you make it out to be. Cloak drains a lot of battery, and quickly. You can’t just keep chugging power bars because you’re going to run out, especially in long areas. And to actually make the cloak effective, you need to also invest in silent walking/running, which chews up even more battery. That’s even after fully upgrading your cloak and battery.
Every PC game can be said to be a point and click adventure if you simplify it enough. I’d say slipping past guards without their noticing is plenty adventure, especially with all of the ways you can do so even without firing a single shot.
