Sneaky Fucker Thread

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Mark of the Ninja is good.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHAHA

If everyone that sees you dies, then you remain undetected.

I wouldn't call him a Ninja but fuck wew, was he fun as fuck to play as.

Ninja five O

The Dude sex games
Metro games can be played stealthy although it's for the most part your own choice since guns blazing works as well.
Dishonored but it only really makes fun if you use all the nice abilities and therefore get some forced "meany :(" comments from the game.

Why can't people just fucking copy the original 2 Thief games. Every god damn game since then has been slow and shitty. Everyone thinks stealth should be this fucking pacman shit where you spend 95% of the time waiting for an opening in a guards patrol route then go in. Not realizing in Thief you spend 70% of the time running around a gigantic level, 20% of the time trying to sneak past guards, and probably less than 10% of the time actually sitting there waiting on the NPC to turn his back. I mean fuck. The original Deus Ex has more fun stealth than most of this genre.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

Monaco

Dark Mod Project

Ninja he ain't, sneaky fuck he is.

I really didn't like it. Can't even pin down why. I didn't hate anything , far from it. But in every aspect of the game there was something that didn't feel good to me. The gameplay, the game's speed, the artwork and the story just weren't my taste for some reason.
I really love Invisible, Inc., which is made by the same team.

Any I can play as Catgirls?

If you were making a stealth game why would you go out of your way to make the stealth dull simple shit and the combat so fun? That's completely ass backwards. Why not make fun stealth powers and items? I'm trying so hard to understand but it's just not happening.

I just started playing the original Thief, but I've run into a problem. Crouch walking and sneaking seem redundant. Do each of them have specific uses or is it just down to preference?

The faster you move, the more noise you make. You can run on rugs and make no noise at all, but if you run over a marble tile, then every damn guard in the vicinity will go to investigate. Every floor material has different footsteps sounds.

haven't played Dishonored 2 yet (I have a toaster), but doesn't feature a magic depletion meter? that webm looks broken as fuck

anyways OP, have another one recommending Chaos Theory. I don't really consider Thief to be a true "assassin/ninja" type of game even if it's the purest stealth game out there

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Is the standing sneaking better than crouch walking? I figured since crouching makes you a much smaller target that using sneaking instead would be a better option in some way (quieter for example) since it would just be inferior to crouching in every way.

I wish more games would hire British studios to do VA work.

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Try doing both at once on metal surfaces, if you want to save moss arrows for somewhere else.

Dishonored 2 has fixed that, non lethal options are much more varied than just sneaking up behind someone and choking him. Also high chaos doesn't occur as soon as you kill anybody like you're implying, you have to go out of your way and kill more than half the total population to get it.

No mention of the series built around assassinations?

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I think it matters more the light when you are sneaking and crouch walking is to lower your sound.

I'll never understand people that have a problem with that ending after spending the whole game gleefully decapitating guards.
Emily rules with an iron fist and you keep doing what you do best: remove non-vital organs like the head from traitorous bastards. It's edgy but it's not punishing you.
I mean, why should you get a fairy tail ending after doing a full apprenticeship on Cuts&Stabs101? How would that even make sense?

That webm makes me regret not buying it, but 60 gigs of disk space is too much. I can easily get it but that just screams "unoptimized crap" that I'd rather not deal with.

Mark of the Ninja does Predatory Stealth very, very well. It's unbelievable how few games there are where you can weaponize fear and scare your prey shitless.

The world doesn't run on karma and murdering people is a very efficient way of producing a better world.

Noise is tied to movespeed not whether or not you're crouching.
Crouching can sometimes make you more concealed and duck through secrets. Try crouching in some places where you're still lit up a little and see what it does to the light gem.

In my opinion this is how it should be. I always found the idea that crouching magically enters stealth mode to be retarded.

Crouch makes you harder to see, sneaking makes you harder to hear. Crouch makes you harder to hear as well because it slows you down but that's a side effect, not the main thing.
Try both on different surfaces to see that crouch isn't as effective as sneaking.

I meant how'd it make sense thematically. You present a story that you solve with repeated stabs and brutal murder and in the end everything is happy and sunshine?
That wouldn't make much sense, would it?

Murdering people is a very efficient way of culling the population of dissenters and criminals ensuring only the smartest and baddest stay alive, the ones that are actually serious problems. And not only that, now they have reasons to fear and hate you, making you their number one target.
If your "better world" is one that fosters a "who can kill the other first", you're right otherwise cooperation and diplomacy are still a superior choice.

This guy knows what's up.

This.
I don't know why people keep asking for an Ass Creed set in Japan when this entire series is better than it'll ever be.

Is that from Redwall?

No its a card from magic: Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni

I guess you could do it in TES but they're hardly quality stealth games.

Rainworld.

Isn't there a literal redwall stealth game in early access right now
Or at least inspired by redwall

This?
It's been in early access for so long I've lost hope for it.

Well, what's already there is supposedly really fucking good

I do love Tenchu and Shinobido. Too bad that the newer games don't seem to be all that great.

That's because they're not.

So that means it's bad then?

It has exactly one memorable level.
It's the second to last one, the Cradle.
I swear to fuck that level probably inspired the guys who made Penumbra/Amnesia, but nobody will believe me.

Honestly while it was narrative-wise a solid closure for the series, the entirety of it is skippable gameplay wise to say the least.

Forgot to post relevant vid.

That's Thief 3. Thi4f has like one or two levels on par with a Thief 3 level but with the shit modern "gameplay" it doesn't matter.

I straight up forgot Thief 4 existed, got them confused, my bad, and yeah, Thief 4 is absolute garbage.

some legacy those developers left, the so called "HUGE THIEF FANS"

I find stealth in MMOs is usually quite well balanced :^)

Thief is an actual stealth game, meaning crouch isn't a magical "don't get detected mode" like it is in most action games with tacked-on sneaking. It just makes you a little harder to see (not hear), like it would in real life.

Are any of the later Tenchu games worth playing? I loved Tenchu 2 as a wee lad but I haven't played anything after that.

Thief 4 had okay gameplay if you played on Master difficulty and turned off Focus and the other handholds.
It didn't stack up as a Thief game, but on its own it was actually a proper stealth game, and was at least competent. It is to the Thief series what Blacklist is to the Splinter Cell series. The only big difference was that it was lacking a lot of polish, especially in the audio department.

Sadly not, from what I heard. I only ever played 2(or rather, "wrath of heaven"), 3 and Shinobido. It seems like the only good one I missed was 1 and the original version of 2. I'd still play Z if I could, if only for the character creator.

As someone who enjoyed Blacklist this is a load of bullshit, because at least Blacklist wasn't boring as shit and knew what it wanted to accomplish.
Thi4f on the other hand wants to be immersive and moody but has a Hollywood retard script.
Vid related, the game constantly undermines itself.

I disagree. They tried to be all things to all people. You could run-and-gun on any difficulty below Perfectionist. And the "pure stealth" side ops from Grim would fail you if you got one alarm or were spotted once, which fails to understand the point of stealth design (improvisation). There was even a fucking FPS segment in the main campaign.

It was at the very least damage controlled by virtue of a rushed release, but the game had a tone of bizarre, 24-like camp that I it never dropped.

Meanwhile Thi4f is crass, then it wants you to think Garrett has regrets, then it tells you these are things "he has to do", and is essentially an action movie script despite a slow burn gothic mystery setting.
It's contradictory to the gameplay, where Blacklist is retardedly campy gameplay with retardedly campy setting and cutscenes.

See; having your base in a fucking plane, characters getting upset at each other for withholding information about a multi-hundred-million dollar operation they're about to do, calling their daughters who're voiced only on the phone that causes music from the last game to play, the bad guy who trafficked people in the last game suddenly becoming a good guy over the course of the game, etc.
The script reads like a parody where Thief 4's is just flat out insult.

I would have never thought of that

Oh, I agree the story is fucked. I was never interested in it to begin with, so I guess it didn't bother me as much as it did other people.

Yeah, the story in Blacklist is fucked, but it at least helps the gameplay make sense on some level, vid related.
I wouldn't see any past Fisher doing this; classic Fisher is too conservative, slow-paced and ninja-like, Conviction Sam is a fucking murderer, but Blacklist Sam is at least enough of a meathead retard that tells himself what a good American soldier he is due to his ego that he'd be over competent about dealing with an arms smuggling ring by… Knocking everyone out in less than two minutes.

I meant the story in Thi4f. I agree with you that it was done in a worse way than Blacklist's.
Though, on the subject of Splinter Cell, it's a shame that they took the series in the direction of being just another "hurr America stronk" thing.
The first game had enough self-awareness to throw in barbs about the CIA manipulating elections, and Chaos Theory goes right to the edge of advocating another American civil war, before turning back. In those games, Sam always knew that he was an agent of a morally ambiguous foreign policy, but he also really thought that it was still the best thing for the world in the long run.
Then in Double Agent, they went full Hollywood, and never looked back.

To be fair in the right version of DA (og xbox) it stuck to what CT did, but yeah, agreed in full.

Ayame is mai waifu

You improvise to avoid detection when in a bind. I'll agree a game shouldn't automatically be over once you're detected, but an evasion state is a fail state. You have failed at stealth and live with the consequences. Saying escape is part of stealth is a fundamental misunderstanding.

I think the saddest thing is how this was the only way they knew how to challenge casuals since every damn game gives you projectile nonlethal attacks at this point in large ammo pools.

Escape is part of stealth, because stealth is about partial failure states (i.e., fail states that don't give you a game over). A guard hearing footsteps and saying, "What is that?" is one. Being caught is another. Being caught is no longer a partial failure state if you get a game over for it.

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Skyrim with mods, m8

Not quite. If you miss a piece of loot in Thief, that's not a failure state, it's just a missed piece, you can still improve and what matters is the main object you came to steal anyway.

Likewise, if you are caught, you gotta deal with it but it's not a failure state. Failing to get away with the item you came to steal is the only failure state.
Everything else is just being sub-optimal.

He (and I) are talking "partial fail states" or "implied fail states," AKA improvisational states–where the game punishes you for fucking up, but doesn't force you to restart. Stealth games live and die by them. There's a good talk by one of the original Thief devs about it, I'll see if I can find it.

Really?
It's one of the few Stealth games i know that really goes out of it's way to implement verticality, and it gives so many fucking routes for each area that you really feel like infiltrating a real place.

Play The Dark Mod.
It's free!!!

I haven't given that game another look since I found out the devs were in a movie about gamers raping gamer girls.

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That's a retarded reason to avoid playing something, especially when you could just pirate it even.

I hated Styx. I just wanted the goblin to shut the fuck up with his constant talking and for the game to stop holding my hand.

How does it compare with the first two thief games? One of these posts tells me that it nails level design and the other tells me that it screwed up in terms of gameplay/atmosphere.

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It does level design really, really well. And your gadgets are also quite usefull in the right situation.
Combat is also as you'd expect uneffective as fuck unless you're on easy mode and even then it doesn't work for everyone. You can still murder people but it's a hassle.
The atmosphere is also pretty cool, the persoective you get from being that tiny on places that are far too big even for humans is cool and there's a nice gritty feel to everything except for the more clean and polished levels that are meant to be posh.

The problem you might have with the game is that certain rooms feel more like a puzzle where you can see 2-3 obvious solutions to the problem at hand. This doesn't upset some people but it does upset me, that you end up playing out the real clever plan the devs planned out for you instead of coming up with one of your own.

That said, there's still a lot of more open areas where you can improvise and do your thing.

Also, keep in mind that the game is a lot more story focused than Thief. Garret was a bloke that went to places because everyone has a job and eventually he gets involved in something bigger than himself that he is not too keen in caring about.
Meanwhile, Styx starts pretty heavy on a personal story, you keep doing missions for said story and there's a lot of dialogue.
The story is pretty cool actually, with a nice twist near the end that relates very well to the gameplay, but I can see how some people would dislike having so much talking in a game about being sneaky.

As someone who makes minimalist stealth run vids, it gets really old having people tell me stealth is defined by my ability to adapt to mistakes I don't make in the first place.
Just like survival horror, if I don't get hit I don't have to ration health, and if I don't make noise I won't have to "adapt" to the suspicion in the first place.

No, the beauty is in finding the least blatant way to do anything, whether it's knocking lights out or throwing a distracting item, it's finding that solution to a puzzle.

Arguments about how stealth games are about how you "adapt" talk about stealth like it's defined by whether you can beat Hitman Blood Money when there is an entire layer of beauty defined by coins, large-scale mine explosion distractions and fucking with the AI in it's purest form, "adapt" my ass.
Stealth games are too goddamned replication-friendly and predictable on a second for second basis to say they're about some degree of a fail state or not, it's fucking with the AI until you get the result you want, adaptability only really comes into play during ironman runs.

No, don't do that. It doesn't.

such a piece of shit game

It's not defined by you actively making the mistakes, it's defined by the possibility space that allows for those mistakes.

That's the highest expression of player skill, and I agree that it is beautiful. But that's your part, the player's. The designer's part is different.
Don't mistake me–I'm not saying you're supposed to fuck up, or that playing in a way that maximizes your time in improvisation states is the best way to play. I'm saying that stealth games support those improvisational states better than almost any other genre, and that this support is fundamental to stealth games. It's also, by the way, the same thing that allows normal but skilled players to do perfect ghost runs without being autistic speedrunners; because the game's possibility space is widened to allow for partial failure, it's also more feasible to be perfect, without resorting to autism.

I understand and agree, I just want you to know that's a great quote.

why does the rato have tits?

You can't just be saying stuff like that without elaborating.

To make sure you're jerking to a female rat.

So, no mention of Velvet Assassin? I'm guessing it wasn't very good.

It was so good nobody even noticed the game itself. It took it's sneakiness to a meta level.

It's shit, yes.

Sneaky goblin is too underrated.
It's the purest stealth, you play as a small sneaky fucker and have to do a lot of climbing and jumping around, the levels are huge and intricate with many ways to get from one point to another and they're full of hiding spots and allow for tons of sneaky goblin trickery.

I think something it tapped into that a lot of people don't realize was genius is that it isn't Metal Gear Solid 3 where you can half measure things and tranquilize people to sleep.
If you want to nonlethal, you can't even do Death to Spies and rely on a limited or loud resource of pure melee.

To go full pacifist actually means you'll have to ghost things, meaning you can't "kill" npcs without killing them. No elimination, just murder, which means people are forced to ghost when they otherwise would just lie to themselves about being nice people.

It's shilled in every god damn thread and acted like it's the second coming. It's really overrated in my book. The controls and pace are just not my thing.

yeah plus the samey level design really makes the shilling about the levels being huge and vertical really irrelevant.

it's a 6/10.

I can understand praise for the vertical level design, because that's something that really brings level design in stealth games together. I couldn't even get far enough to notice how same the levels are just because of how clunky it feels. I think Thief spoiled me. I never played a stealth game that has felt that razor tight ever since, minus shit like the Spy in TF2.

best I can offer for tight level design is quake maps. Also check out in the shadows for quake.

just like the first one, you mean?

i pirated it long time ago, it wasn't really attracting my attention much until recently.

I bought it super cheap and gave it a try, still meh but could be better, but the violet or whatever chic is fucking hot.

It's not just about verticality, it's about having multiple ways to go everywhere. Styx is one of the few games where actually ghosting a level is more fun fun and practical than anything else. In most other stealth games trying to avoid taking down guards is a pain in the ass because of all the waiting and needing to have the patrols memorized but in Styx there's always a quick way to keep the game flowing if you pay attention to the environment, like beams on the ceiling, tables to hide under, windows, hanging on the outside of a walkways, etc.

If they want to do porn that's fine by me.

In the original Thief games, the light gem has multiple states in between "fully lit" and "completely in shadow." Thi4f has only three states: dark, light, and in between. Did you even play it?

no, the game was modern trash anyway and you should kill yourself for ever implying otherwise

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Pic related had many good parts. I certainly liked it better than many Asscred games but man, it could have been so much more.

sauce for 3rd image?

I swear these fucks spin in place to look at me the second I make a move on them.

I know what you mean. It was a pretty decent power fantasy that lacked real chalenge (but wasn't as easy as some people try to make it look like) and it did proper orc slaying look like a fun past time. Too bad the Nemesis system was not very deep or interesting and the story took so much space in the game. Glad I pirated it.

Luckily, the sequel seems to be adressing these points, with difficulty options and the story is just "Let's fuck Mordor up and conquer it!". I'm still waiting for proper reviews since the only thing we got was hype material but I hope it delivers and they learned from the previous game.

reverse-image says it's an Elf Infiltrator for Shadowrun.

AY YO
I just finished playing the Metal Age, should I bother with Deadly Shadows or move onto mods/custom maps? Also has anyone here played The Dark Mod?

Styx. The 1st one, currently playing the 2nd one and it's less fun.
Shadow Tactics. Like Commando's, but with ninja's

Deadly Shadows is worth playing, yes.

What mods are you using to make that so beautiful???

Dark Mod? Shit yeah, man, I'm actually one of the main content contributors.
Suggested mission author time?

For some reason the dark mod always felt a little bit clunky to me compared to the original Thiefs. Blackjacking, for example, didn't feel as reliable because the other dudes body ragdolls. If they're wearing armor it can either be quiet or loud as fuck depending on how the ragdoll lands. I don't recall there being an option to blackjack and immediately grab the body or anything either.

There is but you have to be really, really fucking fast and it isn't always an option to say the least.
This is kind of intentional though, some npc's straight up cannot be knocked out due to armor, some are placed in areas distinctly to get you to use another resource. It isn't the kind of game that always lets you knock everyone out.

Yeah. If they had a full caged helmet they couldn't be knocked out, some could be knocked out but not if they've seen you already. I didn't mind those. When it comes to actually knocking people out I prefer Thief's fixed animation to rag dolling 10000x over. That's just one thing though. There's something about the dark mod. It doesn't feel right.

Like even the graphics style reminds me of those high-resolution mods, which make the game look a little bit better but are a pain to play with because there is too much detail or contrast or something. Like in this darkmod and thief comparison. In the dark mod my eyes are immediately drawn to the walls. Idk why because there is just so much noise and contrast in the wall texture that I just immediately start staring at the wall. In thief I don't really have this problem.

I think they made the problem even worse. Look at this skeleton picture. In the old version I glance at it and I'm like "Yeah that's a skeleton" but in the updated one there's something jarring about it that makes me want to stare at it more. Probably because it looks way higher detail than the actual stuff in the background, and the sword it's holding.

The only place I ever really had this problem is, like I mentioned earlier, HD texture mods. This phenomenon actually makes me wonder if 3d graphics artists are aware of this and color accordingly.

Make a post about it in the forums, the place is open to criticism.
Hell, model and make alternatives yourself.

I do see your point, I think this is as much a result of coloration as it is the fact that the Doom 3 engine was essentially built around obscuring things, not pronouncing them. You have amazingly detailed… Everything, incredible lighting, but not much focus on actual coloration focus from an engine perspective.

I might if I remember my login and start playing it again so I can give more detail on what I don't like. I've never really heard of anyone else having this issue though so it could be exclusively to me.

I usually just use the looking glass to scope things out.
Hate to say it, but I don't really have the problem since I rely on sound and have what amounts to the MGS 3 binocs to scope things out.

That said, in the cases I don't, I do see your point, stuff doesn't really "pop" as much as it perhaps should in distances and shadow, though normally they look fine.

That said the game looks better than Thief 3, I'll say.

I could never play Thief 3. I tried the first mission and couldn't stand it. I don't know why, but when it comes to stealth I need the controls to be razor tight and be able to tell what I'm doing.

When it works it's my favorite genre. In fact I'm really forgiving for gameplay to as long as it's not too easy or too slow, like one of my go-to stealth games is Farcry 2 just because of the sheer difficulty but decent level design. You can also sprint if you're moving between cover while trying to close in on an enemy base. Also I'll do solo stealth runs in payday 2. That being said. Something like Styx, Thief 3+, dishonored I can't stand. Dishonored primarily because of how piss easy it is. I'd rather attempt stealth in stalker than play dishonored.

You know why that is? Your first person movements have to synch with the third person model. But yeah, there's only one truly noteworthy mission in the game, and it's The Cradle as I mentioned earlier.

Also, yeah, I get you. A warning, if you haven't already, avoid Splinter Cell Blacklist.
It isn't bad, but Fisher feels like a drunk tank in that.

I'll say this, though, as much as you may not like Dark Mod, mantling is a thousand fucking times better. Just look up videos of missions Melan made that require precision jumping and tell me otherwise, there is shit you simply wouldn't be able to consistently pull off in Thief Gold/2.
Vid related, in particular sequence at 5:30
15:00
17:30
And then the sequence at 27:40

You cannot do shit like that in Thief Gold and Thief 2 level design-wise.

I'll give you that. Mantling in Thief was janky as fuck. Even mantling in place was crap. Sometimes you'd jump. If you where climbing a ladder and mantled to skip the last few steps it'd give off a jump noise (I remember this in paticular in the warehouse level in Thief 2, when getting on the catwalks). It only worked 1/3rd of the time so you couldn't do jumps like in that vid.

That level actually looks pretty good to. I only remember a handful of levels I played in the darkmod looking as well designed as that.

I should've mentioned, Melan makes amazing levels with lots of fucking vertical emphasis, something you rarely see done in games these days.
Dark Mod really is just a matter of finding authors you like, exploring everything they've done and then exploring everything else. Most folks I know just download some random stuff, try it out and get some really bad or average missions that don't really inspire lots of confidence, but if you find look the gems are worth looking for.

Yeah, Thief mantling reveals just how bizzarely "slippery" the game's physics are compared to Dark Mod, there's a lot more emphasis on sliding and slopes and far more floaty action, which is why Dark Mod feels far more like you're essentially "planted" by comparison.