What's the best stealth mechanic you've ever encountered and why?
While the one in VtMB is often broken, when it does work I always liked how it tells me how close I really am to getting detected. I wouldn't say it's the best, but it's the kind of direction I'd want a stealth mechanic to go to.
Elder Scrolls games.
It just works.
in Metal Gear Solid 4 and FF11, a fucking MMO of all things, smell was actually a factor in enemy detection which is pretty cool. it wasn't anything more complicated than "get too close and they can smell you" but still.
E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy because you have to be actually invisible to not get detected, you can't just stand in the shadows in the corner and masturbate like some creepy fuck
Detection by scent seems like an underused concept, probably because it's hard to implement meaningfully I imagine.
Might not be particulary good but I really liked how you could use the wind in Betrayer to mask your sounds.
I really enjoyed the system in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter that was essentially enhancing your New Game+ based on your performance in the previous run.
And also having a vat of Party Exp that you could save and roll over to a new game or use to buff a weaker party member if need be.
I really loved stealth in Boktai. Not because the stealth mechanics were anything special, but because the game was full of really great enemies. I think that's a pretty big component of stealth games that's all too often ignored.
The normal enemies have a sleep schedule and they react to sight and sound. Some of them are invisible until you get them in darkness.
Golems immediately try to attack you when they're alerted but because they're curled into a ball they can't see where they're going. If you're smart you can use them to defeat other enemies in order to save ammo.
Mummies are totally blind so you can sneak around them right in the open but their hearing is so good that they'll even notice normal footsteps on plain flooring. If you set them on fire they'll run around panicked flailing and killing other enemies in the room.
Spiders totally ignore you unless you get caught in their webs, which are usually invisible. So you need to use your tools or waste ammo checking to see if the way ahead is clear.
Cockatrices are birds so they sometimes fly above the terrain and spot you if you aren't pressed against the wall. Also you usually find them in hall of mirrors scenarios so you can try and hit them with their own stone gaze or angle your bullets while out of earshot to stun/kill them easily.
And while it's not exactly stealth, I really loved how in the 2nd game they gave you another option if you wanted to play more lethally. You have a sick vampire form that just tears through enemies and has some transformations that give you alternate paths through a level. You can't walk through the rain or eat normal food without taking a lot of damage. But you can suck blood or use your coffin to recover HP/energy. The coffin is the interesting part because once you reach the end of the level and defeat the boss you have to take him in a coffin and sneak back to the entrance where you finish him off with the solar piledriver. Being able to buy all sorts of coffins was a neat addition because obviously having a higher quality or gimmicky coffin makes your vampire form much stronger but it also makes it harder to transport the boss since more comfortable coffins also regenerate the boss and he'll struggle much harder against you. One of them is really neat because its a tank that lets you regenerate while moving through puzzle rooms or miniboss rooms but the downside is that it has a squeeky wheel so if the boss acts up and starts trying to escape he's going to attract the attention of a lot of enemies.
I felt like that about SkiFree.
It's in every hunting game ever.
I liked the way Monaco dealt with violent approaches.
Killing takes items you need to recharge and other guards can revive dead ones.
Actually lethal weapons are also pretty loud most of the time.
Chaos Theory
You had two seperate bars, one for sound and one for light. They would fill up and deplete according to the "background" noise and light. Meaning if you were standing next to a loud machine the sound bar would be completely filled up and if you were standing in the middle of nowhere completely empty.
On those bars you also had sliders which indicate how much noise you make and how visible you are. As long as the slider was below the filled bar enemies couldn't hear you. If the slider for visibility was not completely down they still had a small chance to get suspicious however.
Combined with that you could also regulate your walking speed WITH THE FUCKING MOUSEWHEEL HOW AWESOME IS THAT. I'm honestly surprised why more games don't do this, it's so wonderfully intuitive.
And on top of that you could do all kinds of other neat stuff like pressing yourself against a wall, throwing shit as a distraction, the ability to do a split in narrow corridors above the enemies heads and lots of other acrobatic shit.
...
Positional audio in Thief. It's the best possible way to do first-person stealth, and is done so well that it's effectively a substitute for the look-around-corners conceit of most third-person stealth games.
Peace walker had some good fucking shit
Or even worse
Trying to knock out a guy sitting in a chair
???
It's not hard.
Doesn't always work. Sometimes they just stand up, do a 180 and kill me while Fisher is in the middle of the animation which gets cut off.
Huh. I've never had that problem before, but I played it on an Xbox.
I liked the Skyrim one
The eye? It's a pretty elegant way of implementing a detection meter. But detection meters are irredeemably casual-tier.
Well sometimes game stealth mechanic is broken so you have to have some detection matter
For a game like Skyrim, that tries to be a jack of all trades (stealth, combat, conversation, crafting, exploration, etc.), I guess I can understand using a detection meter, though I still wouldn't personally prefer it.
But for games that are trying to be proper stealth games (or pretending, like Assassin's Creed), light and sound indicators should be used instead. (These don't have to be HUD elements, as long as you can tell how bright and loud you are.) That way, you're encouraged to stay sneaky the whole time, rather than simply manipulate a detection meter.
Blacklist's detection meter was one of the reasons I couldn't get into it. The game ends up giving you conflicting priorities: 1) "Don't go in the light," and 2) "It doesn't matter if you go in the light, as long as you aren't caught."
I was looking at the health bar and had flashbacks of the horrible aggravated health system in that game. Its one thing to have slow regen health for certain types of enemies, its another to put literally all those types of enemies in a long gauntlet of pain halfway through the game.
Nothing too special but Neon Chrome has a bunch of randomly generated classes for your assets that you can choose before every run
One of those classes is called Assassin and the assassin comes with a skin enhancement that makes them invisible in shadows. Now because the game is top down twin stick shootan you don't even notice the shadows at first but then you do and you can pull off cool shit like breaking down a wall to flank enemies while in the shadows and whack them before they even realize you're there.
There's even a random map modifier that happens every now and then that cuts off the power and makes everywhere shadow. It's assassin heaven
I really liked the "stealth" in MGS. At the time, it felt very meticulous and detail-oriented. I mean, soldiers could track you by looking at your footprints in the snow.
Why do there have to be indicators at all
Good level and sound design would remove the need entirely
There don't (assuming you mean "HUD elements"). Just feedback. The point is that stealth gameplay should give you feedback on how bright and loud you are, not how close the AI is to spotting you.
I love how the different kinds of floors in Thief make different footstep sounds when you walk on them, and it makes rich people houses more difficult to infiltrate because they have marble floors whereas poor schmucks just have wood or dirt which makes much less noise.
Then you can also shoot arrows that plop down dirt on the ground and you can use that to mask your footsteps in a castle.
It's fucking sad that there hasn't been a stealth game better than Thief (although some, like Chaos Theory, are definitely in the same league).
Also, they're moss arrows, not dirt arrows.