Stealthfag thread

There's the Dark Mod. None of the fan missions are anywhere near as good as Thief 1 or 2, but mechanically it's great.

Forgot about that one, I wasn't able to get into it too much, but I heard it was pretty good.

I just missed the crystal clear sound design in Thief.

I could never get into Styx. The movement feels awkward.

Squat-walking to avoid detection

Took a little to get used to, but it's not bad after a half-hour

Then you're not playing the right fan missions, stealth fans are creative.

I need to sit down and try to play it again. I think another thing that annoyed me is it was pretty slow paced in comparison to something like thief.

I can understand the appeal of most genres but I cannot at all fathom the point of Stealth Games.

For instance, I played Thief, even on the hardest difficulty it was fairly easy, it's like a walking simulator with a bit more to do than gape at the scenery. I appreciated the details in the game, for instance finding the abandoned temple in the Cragscleft mines that had some Holy Water you could use to destroy the zombies as well as various other things throughout the levels, but by the time I got to that level where you have to steal something from the two brothers who are the head of some criminal group or something I just lost interest. You just patiently observe the way guards or whatever move, form a plan and get past them, and even then you have to force yourself to play in a more structured way, the game becomes piss easy on the levels with mostly humans if you just knock everyone out and dump them in a cupboard.

Explain to me their appeal.

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You just explained their appeal.

Seriously though you wont enjoy stealth games unless you get off on being somewhere you're not suppose to be without other people knowing or outmaneuvering people.

The Dark Mod though that's really just more Thief. Deadly Shadows, if you have not played it, is inferior but tolerable. Get the sneaky upgrade for it and it's actually rather enjoyable. Otherwise try NOLF 1 and 2.

Outside of pure stealth you've got DMoMM's stealth gameplay and predator games like Esacpe from Butcher Bay. I personally don't find the predator games scratch that same itch but it's worth a shot as the Riddick games are good anyway/

Thief gets better in the later levels as the difficulty increases. The mission with the two thieves you described is one of the poorest in the game in my opinion.

Oh and I forgot Death to Spies. Avoid the third game but the first two are pretty great. It reminds me a lot of a slavic take on Hitman 1 and 2 compared to the more social direction Contracts and Blood Money went. You might also try Mark of the Ninja but it's obviously a very different style.

nice buzzword faggot, stopped reading there

I love Styx, pretty excited for Shards of Darkness. You should try Hitman(I hear absolution is bad but I haven't played it myself, and the most recent one is episodic so pass that until it's all complete) and Death to Spies(skip the third game, Alkheine's Gun) but it's more about blending in plain sight than being a ghost that no one realizes has arrive until after the fact. You can also try Mark of The Ninja, Gunpoint(both these games for 2D) and The Wonderful(Or Marvelous Miss Take, I'm not sure which is the actual name) Miss Take for some more casual stealth(it's still loads of fun though and the three characters give it some variety). There's also Invisible Inc but it's more Turn Based Tactics that true stealth, but it's still VERY enjoyable)

I'm curious, has anyone played Shadwen? I'd like to give it a shot but I haven't heard much about it.

LOL

Does anybody here know if Death to Spies is any good?

Hitman 2016
Dishonored
Sir, You Are Being Hunted
Death to Spies

Yeah it's good. The first is a bit rough around the edges and the second is pretty difficult, especially on the hardest difficulty(I forgot what it was called, scavenger?) but they're both really good games.

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Why being a perfectionist is so hard user?

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deus ex in general is a fun series for stealth.
part one is a classic, invisible war isnt as bad as people say, human revolution is good and the last part i wont play until its either cracked or at sale for 10 or less.

Styx was decent.

AI was pretty dumb sometimes and I had lots of AI path finding issues (them getting stuck behind objects). I liked the enemy diversity and story.

Rate my gameplay, Holla Forums

Is Thief 2X any good?

Story has been decent so far (50%). Not looking forward to escorting the oldfag though.

Those tokens and secondary objectives are a bitch

It's amazing. No, it's beyond amazing.

It's so good you'll never have to post here for validation again.

That's the best part about stealth games. Being in a completely safe room full of people you just knocked out and just chilling.

The point is mostly the voyeur aspect of it. It's neat to just stop for a while and take in the view from beneath a table or hanging on some small hole in a wall.
Most people playing stealth games do so not to rush it and finish the mission but rather for the pleasure of creeping around and doing everything they want while nobody else notices them.

You have the very basic aspect of doing things without being seen like tossing bottles at guards heads and then hide, laughing at their shouts as they search for you in vain.
Then stealing things that other people notice that go missing (especially when they murder their friends because they think they did it, that one never gets old!)
Then finnaly activating traps and mechanisms to fuck with people and the environment as they panick unaware of what's happening.
You do either of these things and you feel power over everyone else. You can control and manipulate them to some degree without even showing up, it feels awesome.

Then you have the chalenge side, where people like playing these games with some sort of chalenge in mind, the most basic of which is not being caught or even seen.
Keep in mind that good stealth games have you be very weak and lacking offensive capabilities that make combat straight up unviable. If you can play it like a swordsman, you're a thug, not a thief. Simply finishing a good stealth game is already an accomplishment since the odds are stacked against you and you still win using your wits and arsenal.
But pulling the same and avoid detection, that takes a lot of skill since it's not about just surviving, it's about distractions, routes, creative use of your arsenal and plans in advance.

You finish a level by actually ghosting (not leaving any trace you were ever there) and you feel like a professional that pulled something your average street thug can't even dream of.

aragami

Is Shadwen gud?

Is that path of shadows or whatever it was called? Is it out of alpha/beta yet?

bloodmoney is the shit one though.

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not sure if they are one in the same

I just checked, Path of Shadows was their first (free) game and Aragami is what they'll be selling in five weeks.

Also the difference looks pretty good. I remember playing a very early alpha back in 2014 and it looks much more different than what you posted. I like seeing noticeable improvements instead of downgrades as the game goes on. Not a fan of the jap voices though

I finally got around to playing the Rocksbourg trilogy. I loved the first two though I had to use a guide for the keys in the garden in the first one. The third really isn't appealing to me and I think I might drop it.

I really wish the guy who made Ashen Age had continued with it.

Since Tenchu/Shinobido hasn't been mentioned I'll throw them in here, they have horrible mandatory bossfights (90% of which can be cheesed with items), but the stealth is solid and fun, if a little easy until you come across the undead/supernatural. The first 2 Tenchu games have a lot of verticality and great level design that is lost in the later ones in exchange for more general polish. The music for Tenchu is outstanding. Shinobido puts a much stronger emphasis on speed, with missions having a timelimit, it also has a crafting system and a faction loyalty system. They're worth trying out unless you're one of the autists who thinks only nonlethal is stealth.

How early are we talking for splinter cell?
I think the series peaked with CT

This user has it right.

Unfortunately
Angers and confuses modern devs and players.
I've been searching for a video from a few years ago to webm up and post in rage threads and the like, maybe someone ITT will know where to find it: Polygon or Kotaku or some similar types streaming a look back at Thief. At one point the person playing repeatedly rushes a single guard, and dies, over and over again, and they chuckle and start talking about how badly designed the combat is. Ring a bell for anyone?

Tenchu games haven't been mentioned nearly enough in this thread.

Mark of the Ninja is good, but very easy. Fun to speedrun.

Been playing Thief Gold. The first mission took me an hour and half the first time I played through it. The game fucked up somehow as I was trying to fix the issue with the map, so I had to end up deleting it. I installed it again and threw some patches in there that add additional resolution and audio options and, more importantly, fix the god damned map issue. Second time I played through the first level it took me 11 minutes. Great atmosphere, I like the cheeky dialogue, and interesting level design, but the AI are dumb as bricks. I guess that's to be expected, given how old the game is. Still pretty fun.

Thief 1/2/2X raised my standards so high that I consider the entire Splinter Cell series mediocre to trash by comparison, and I loved Styx.

Hitman 2: SA is also on par with blood money even though it is a bit outdated
But I still find it the missions in SA more engrossing than in BM

I played the shit out of Shinobido and it was fucking dope; it was real fun lurking in the shadows and slitting unsuspecting people's throats
The boss fights are fucking annoying but they're easily managable with the crafting system
Only bad thing about the game is that the missions get quite repetitive and getting the true ending is a real fucking drag and that annoyinh hideout tower defense minigame you're forced to play frequently after missions
And also, protect and escort missions fucking suck

It is actually pretty fun, but like almost every other game I binged it the first time and never touched it again.
help me Holla Forums

MGSV is the best stealth game out there

kek

In a weird way, I actually kind of agree. Granted if MGSV made the Iraq map like the Africa map, it would have been better in regards of freedom of movement for strategic planning. Also, it's much more intense when you don't mark the enemies, leaving you to improvise when someone takes you by surprise. To me the enemy marking and reaction time was a bit of a game breaker in terms of stealth. Granted you can turn reaction time off, but marking happens regardless of using the spyglass anyway.

I still enjoy MGSV from time to time. I like to make Snake wear woodland cammo pants, with no shirt, and bring DD and a rifle made to look like an FAL and pretend to liberate Rhodesia when clearing out outposts. That's one thing about MGSV that I like, is that it will let you make your own fun in free roam mode.

What map issue?

When you're in game and you try to access a menu, whether it be the main options menu or the map, the game screen will go black for a few seconds as the screen needs to adjust the resolution in order to display the map/menu. It's annoying, but it can be fixed by using TFix: ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134733

That's about it.
Everything afterwards went downhill with Conviction being the lowest possible point to reach.
Blacklist did go into the right direction with some very small steps but is still a far cry away from CT.

The reaction time was just for the "oh so cinematic" moments. It wasn't a good idea for people looking for an actual chalenge or proper stealth, especially considering you had a drug for exactly the same thing.
But that's why it was an option to turn off.

The mark system, I really don't get why people rail this hard against it. First MGS already had that Radar that gave you cones of vision and enemy position in it. I'm sure the other iteractions did the same, and with the exception of a few levels where they removed it for extra tension, the "mark" system was always there, just in a different way.

In a way, I actually kinda like it since it makes preparing and scouting more important and it contributes nicely to the game with a factor that most people don't notice.
Because you can mark your enemies, they can drop 2 or 3 times more guards than in previous games. You have tools to keep them in check instead of having to remenber about them all, so the game can have bases with 20+ guards easily.
Even with the "mark" system, I'd often not even have them all marked since you'd still need LoS for that or a Companion to help you there and even when I marked them all, there would still be a lot of chalenge since the sheer number of them made getting an opening much harder.

I'm not even saying that it's better than not having it, it's just a different aproach. Those are military bases, they need a lot of guards to feel like actual bases and the mark system allows the devs to put that many guards without making the game frustrating to the players.

Who would have guessed. I still like the idea of aproaching a base from whatever angle you want and scouting it around before going in, but that was indeed the problem with the desert.
It's the one thing that New Vegas has worse than Fallou 3 as well, everything is great except the desert.

I find Contracts to be the best Hitman, personally. I think Blood Money is a little too transparent and Silent Assassin is a little too opaque.
Also, you might consider trying Blacklist. It's not as good as pre-Conviction Splinter Cell, but it's a decent stealth game if you play on Perfectionist difficulty.

That actually sounds rad as fuck.

If you never pretended to be a ninja when you were a kid, you probably won't get the appeal.

Not a stealth game. But yeah, it can be fun to sneak/blink around in it.

The original hasn't aged well, in my opinion, but it's worth a playthrough. Pandora Tomorrow is basically an expansion pack for the original. Chaos Theory is the best in the series. Both Double Agent versions are worth playing, since, again, they're basically just expansion packs for Chaos Theory. Conviction is trash. Blacklist, as I've said, is an OK stealth game on the hardest difficulty.

If combat is not a punishment, you are not playing a stealth game, no matter how good the sneaking is.

But is Shadwen good?

Mark of the Ninja's endings are kind of like that.

I wonder if it's worth the time.

third 3 literally did nothing wrong and only autists dislike it

You know what it's obvious no one played Shadwen so I guess I have to do so and let you all know. For anyone interested there's a great discount right now at 934C04A0C0C48EDCCE5DBA198750E5178FFF1A9B

Godspeed.

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Fallout 4 sneak build of course.
Autists like will say otherwise but listen only to me. I'm an honest man.

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I bet the husband likes to watch from inside the closet or any other dark, shadowy place. Just like a true stealthfag.

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The thing that bothers me the most in this pic is the husband`s body language, you can see it was the wife`s idea to do this

Lil girl's expression doesn't bother you?

i don`t think she is doing what you think, she`s a kid, kids do funny faces to a camera

She's screaming for help, user.

Ooga booga where da humor at?

This is either contrarianism or the passing of time is fading peoples memories. The levels in Thief 3 are absolutely tiny Invisible War tier small so that they can fit on a console which means loading screens every ten seconds. Levels have no verticality. Third person breaks the game mechanics. The camera in first person isn't bound to the body and the body doesn't move until you take an action. The whole game is grey and blue. There's only 1 remotely rememberable level and it's not for being a good Thief level but for being a good horror game section.

Thief 3 has ALWAYS been trash that people only played at the time because it had Thief in the title and assumed it would be like 1 and 2. Since then I've only ever seen it recommended for 'that' level and never in stealth threads.

No one claimed that it was as good as Thief 1 & 2. Or even close to as good as Thief 1 & 2, It's just not actually a steaming pile of shit. It's just more on the level of everything else.

Just because there was a drop in quality in context of the series doesn't make the game worse on its own.

Shit, I can't beat that.

I know what you're talking about, it was fucking atrocious.
The moment you explain to people that survival horror games and stealth games have shit in common they give you this funny look, but you can't make combat appealing or it just eats the fucking gameplay.

I can't help but think Mark of the Ninja and Styx are like platformers and stealth games having sex in all the right ways.

See vid related.
PP was a fucking joke in terms of how blind the AI was.

Yeah, they do share a lot of conceptual space. I'm surprised there isn't more crossover between these two. The only recent one that comes to mind is Alien: Isolation.

Again Thief 3 is pretty enjoyable if you stick the Sneaky Upgrade on it. Amoung other things it stitches the levels together so you don't have the fucking loading screens. It also lets you turn off loot glint and third person shit.

The person playing this game already knows exactly where to go and how to move in order to avoid detection. Yeah, he's in broad daylight, and yeah he's yards away from what we're meant to believe are actual human beings. It's a video game, user. Do you really expect the AI to have human like perception? That's unreasonable. Instead, you should take a look at how well the AI can respond to any given situation using a variety of behaviors. The AI in this game will

All these elements thrown together make the game engaging. The tension of stealth can be broken at any time and conflict can arise in an instant. It's stealth action, these games have always been about trying to strike a balance between both. Not saying they're the best stealth games ever, but I think it's bullshit to just write off such well thought out gameplay and level design because the game features elements that you'd rather not be able to rely on (like combat).

I'm not saying realism is a priority, I'm saying the AI in this game is fucking blind if you roll.
This wasn't as much an issue in Ground Zeroes where on hard they'd be given 10 extra meters of visibility, but this is just a joke no matter what.
Hell, MGS 3 guards would see you from a ways away if you weren't crawling, and if you wanted to move fast you didn't have a roll that was functionally identical in terms of noise made and visibility to crawling.
All it would've taken was nerfing rolling to make this even mildly more bearable.
Video related, it's slow, tedious and tough, which is what a base in a game should be if you're going into the hardest difficulty without killing or knocking people out while using a stance system.

Well, that's a pretty good point. I feel like they should've kept the hard mode for Phantom Pain. However, there's a mod you can use to make the game more difficult

Hardcore Mod: nexusmods.com/metalgearsolidvtpp/mods/269/?

Basically extends enemy visual and hearing range by 50%, gives the player character less health, and makes it so that choking enemies takes twice as long. Also you get more benefit from moving during weather (i.e. in the rain your footsteps are more muffled than before, in a sandstorm you're hard to see). Use this and make all your loadouts empty so that you practically go in Subsistence style I'm sure there's a mod that lets you play all missions in Subsistence mode but I'm not going to look for anything and for all I know this mod here will have compatibility problems with other mods so for me it's just easier to make all my loadouts as empty as possible

I'm not saying the mod doesn't fix the problem, but relying on mods at any point to fix anything other than outdated aspects of a game visually is basically admitting that the game is flawed.
It's too damn easy, user, sorry. Just yet another sign that the game wasn't done.
Also yeah, there was a mod that let you do that but it did bring up issues and needs an update every damned time the game comes out with a patch. Also added a secret theater no less.

Jesus fucking christ that's some impressive-ass dedication.

Thanks. I don't really get why it's okay to post style vids in cuhrazy but stealth and the like is completely unthinkable.

The best Dark Mod levels really work off the same principles as a good survival horror; choking the player of any resources he'll need, and making them regret using the ones he has when the time comes to use them in extreme cases.

I want a stealth game where I'm as vulnerable as enemies (and in some cases even weaker) but I have tools to out-wit my opponents and assassinate them with high efficiency and preferably action-game style.

Despite Holla Forums memery, Thi4f actually wasn't that bad.

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Sure I mean compared to the originals it's a dung heap, but it's still one off the better stealth titles released in the last 5-10 years. One of the only, too
why is such a fun genre so fucking dead?

It's garbage compared to Styx. Hell, even DXHR is better, I mean shit, at least Detroit was fun.

In fact, bad though it was as a stealth game, Dishonored was still miles better than Thi4f, it had generally open, nonlinear levels. And Dishonored 2 will have Stephen Russell voicing Corvo.

That's just not fair

I didn't like Dishonored enough to want to play it a second time.

The core stealth is dreadfully handled.

They're adding more non-lethal stuff and allowing total opt-out of Outsider powers so it might actually have good stealth gameplay this time around. Maybe.

I mean it is Arkane, they've made great games before and maybe Bethesda is letting their leash a bit looser this time. Will still pirate before buying though.

It's actually the second one but the message is still the same

Play on master custom difficulty and check the rule that says no knockouts. Problem solved.

I guess that explains why I liked Deus Ex and found Splinter Cell and Hitman games so dull.

I do all my sneaking IRL, anyway

Yes, yes it was.
Like, it wasn't quite Watch_Dogs bad, but it was fucking close.
The game wasn't finished, and it's the concept of mediocrity in videogame form along with all the worst trappings of triple a in one game.

do guards have tunnel vision or was it just because its a display build?

So far I'm not feeling Shadwen. The time stops when you stop deal is more a nuisance than anything and the grappling hook isn't as fluid as I'd like it to be.

I've tried this mod and the problem is that the "levels" weren't designed for that kind of AI.
It'd need to be way larger with more paths.

I fucking figured as much, the whole game is too open when it's open and too tight when it's not, and there's no fucking in between and the crawling and sonar hand just breaks half of it.
Fuck me this whole game feels like it was made in a snapmap style "make your own level!" editor.

What kind of computer do you need to run Dark Mod at 60fps, because my framerate is never steady. I even lowered everything to low and to 1280x720, but it was still dropping. Sometimes it's fine, and then it'll drop anyway.

It's just a Doom 3 mod, right? What could be the issue?