Like a Ninja - What Makes a Good Stealth Game - Extra Credits

So last week we mentioned that we'd be doing an episode on stealth, an often requested topic that we've kind of been meaning to cover for a long time. Might as well do it today. But before we can talk about what makes a good stealth game, I think we should talk about why this topic seems to come up so often in fan requests. I think it's because stealth has a dichotomy that very few other game types have. Stealth games tend to either be fantastic or terrible with very little in between. Moreover, this dichotomy is made all the more obvious when people try to use stealth in non-stealth games because we have all played through those stealth sections that turn out to be a horrid slog in otherwise decent games, which all just highlights the question of why is this genre so hard to get right? And why when it does go wrong, does it go so wrong? And the answer to this is actually relatively straightforward. Stealth games are about making waiting engaging. Almost every other type of game is about minimizing waiting, about making the action as engaging as possible and minimizing the time spent not doing that action. For a designer, this is a shift

of mindset that's very hard to wrap your head around and even harder to execute on. It's why games billed as stealth action games so often fail. Rather than trying to make the waiting engaging, they try to patch over the need for patience with high action even though those elements are usually at odds with the overall design. This is also why stealth segments in games not principally about stealth generally fail. In games where the expectation is that the player will be constantly moving or shooting, if you let the players keep their gun, players will want to solve problems with their gun and that desire to do so is just intensified if you try to force them to creep around quietly. It's very hard to make a smooth transition between two forms of play with such a very different pacing. Stealth sections feel leaden in action games. Action sections seem ridiculous and over the top in stealth games which is part of why Metal Gear embraces the ridiculous and goes over the top with its bosses. So how do you make waiting engaging? Well, in good stealth games you're never actually waiting. You're solving a puzzle. Each moment hidden is a moment spent observing and working through the next part of the problem. Even though you may be a ninja or a super spy, stealth game design and stealth level design is much

more akin to designing puzzles than designing encounters like you would in your standard FPS. Each ledge and each patrol path is another piece in a large interlocking logic challenge. So, what makes a good stealth puzzle? Well, here's the thing about puzzles. There are two types. Puzzles with one solution where you have to figure out what the designer was thinking and replicate it, and puzzles where there are multiple solutions where you're given a problem and a set of tools and are told, "Use these tools to solve this problem however you want." Good stealth games rely on the second type of problem set. Takedowns, camera disables, the ability to crawl through ventilation shafts, or grapple up to a catwalk, all just tools in the player's belt. They're logical functions which can be applied to the problems at hand. Any good stealth game teaches the player to think with these techniques, much in the way that Portal taught you to think with portals, and then lets the player think through how to use those techniques at their fingertips to solve the problems the game presents you in a myriad of ways. This year, Mark of the Ninja and Dishonored both tended to provide this sort of play. In fact, the areas where both of these games bogged down are in the few sections where there is only one definitive solution to the puzzles they present. But, in the design of these games, there's a lot of focus on giving the player a number of

easy-to-understand ways to traverse their environment. This is the player's toolkit. Really, stealth is about traversal more than it is about combat. So, delivering on interesting ways to traverse is more valuable to the player than kitting out their arsenal. Which leads us to the next part of what makes a good stealth experience. The stealth fantasy is very different than the power fantasy that most action games deliver on. Stealth is about triumphing despite being disempowered. It's about beating the odds and outwitting your enemy. This is fundamentally different than the dominance fantasy involved in mowing down waves of enemies. And this isn't to say that either one's better, just that they are at the most rudimentary level quite different. If, as a designer, you don't recognize that going in, you'll make a stealth experience that feels as flat as so-called horror experiences where the designers think horror's just about shooting monsters. Lastly, to make a good stealth game, players need fast iteration time. Because stealth games are inherently about waiting, many stealth games make losing time the overt penalty for failing at one of the stealth puzzles. Many such games will require you to hide for X seconds if you're spotted before the world resets and you can really try the task you were working through again. And this is where

a lot of bad stealth games fail. They fail to make this penalty time interesting, or they make the penalty time drag out far too long, preventing players from rapidly iterating on their approach to the problem they were trying to overcome when they got spotted. The best stealth games manage to make escaping rewarding in and of itself, while also minimizing the downtime between attempts at solving a section of the game. Remember, these are basically puzzle games. Imagine if Bejeweled or Professor Layton made you play a stripped-down less engaging version of its puzzles every time you made a bad move or failed to solve a puzzle. The very idea sounds ridiculous, but often that's what stealth games do. You can't just be thinking about how the game plays when your player's doing everything right. The punishment for failing at tasks should be just as engaging as the rest of the experience for a stealth game to really come together. So, why do many stealth games fail? Because they're totally different than what most of us in the industry are used to making. They're about waiting rather than action. They're about triumphing despite weakness, rather than simply displaying power. And they have to be nearly as engaging to fail at as to succeed if we're to use the standard time-based stealth punishment system. Hope that clears up a few things and answer some of the questions. We'll see

you next week.