ZylonBane on 14/6/2018 at 22:08
Quote Posted by heywood
It's hard for me to imagine stealth games on those old platforms.
Today I learned that heywood doesn't know that Metal Gear exists.
heywood on 14/6/2018 at 22:37
To me, a stealth game with a God's eye view is an oxymoron.
Doesn't work the same way for me at all.
Renault on 14/6/2018 at 23:53
You realize in addition to all the Metal Gear games, you're eliminating every Hitman game, every Splinter Cell game, All of the Assassin's Creed titles, Mark of the Ninja, Styx and Tenchu.
Starker on 14/6/2018 at 23:55
Quote Posted by henke
Some of The Witness' later puzzles that incorporate your surroundings and perspective might not work, but for the most part this would've made a kick-ass NES game.
There's quite a lot that would go missing, actually. Not just the sun panel puzzles, colour filter puzzles, shadow puzzles, pillar puzzles, and maze puzzles, but also all the pareidolia, the boat stuff, and the
environmental puzzles inside the world. Not to mention the lasers and the puzzle up the mountain.
icemann on 15/6/2018 at 03:54
Quote Posted by heywood
It's hard for me to imagine stealth games on those old platforms.
Forgetting the original Metal Gear games I assume? Stealth done in top down 2D on very old tech (MSX).
A guy made a guitar hero game for the Commodore 64, and had the guitar working with it. Looked really awesome.
heywood on 15/6/2018 at 13:03
Quote Posted by Brethren
You realize in addition to all the Metal Gear games, you're eliminating every Hitman game, every Splinter Cell game, All of the Assassin's Creed titles, Mark of the Ninja, Styx and Tenchu.
You realize there's a huge difference between an over-the-shoulder camera that follows the player and a top-down God's eye view. I do prefer first-person stealth, but third-person works too.
Quote Posted by icemann
Forgetting the original Metal Gear games I assume? Stealth done in top down 2D on very old tech (MSX).
I just can't wrap my head around stealth from a top-down 2D perspective where you see everything in the room the instant you walk into it, and always know where the enemies are. FOR ME, a large part of the appeal and challenge of stealth games is managing the need for situational awareness against the risk of exposure. Also, using auditory cues along with a memory of what you've observed to work out where the enemies are without having to maintain sight on them. And the suspense of not knowing exactly what's around the corner.
ZylonBane on 15/6/2018 at 13:37
Hooray for you, but technically a stealth game doesn't have to include any of those features. If the gameplay is built around evading enemy detection, it's a stealth game. Even the original 8-bit Castle Wolfenstein can be considered a stealth game.
Renault on 15/6/2018 at 13:43
Quote Posted by heywood
You realize there's a huge difference between an over-the-shoulder camera that follows the player and a top-down God's eye view. I do prefer first-person stealth, but third-person works too.
My bad, when ZB said Metal Gear, I automatically was thinking Metal Gear Solid. Not too familiar with the term "God's eye view" I assumed that meant third person.
scumble on 15/6/2018 at 16:55
I recall Legends of Valour ran tolerably on an Amiga even though the rendered screen area was tiny. My memory says it was engaging enough but I think it would seem tedious now. Following the RPG thread, I think the jump to Morrowind from non-hardware accelerated days of Daggerfall is most significant.
Even so, I can't really say games have been more "immersive" just because of increasingly detailed graphics and effects. We're spoiled by quality to a certain extent.
Come to think of it, one of the most annoying things to come out of quality is the habit of trying to make games look like films. One thing that's annoying me about Mass Effect Andromeda is all the tedious cutscenes - if a game is walking between cutscenes something has gone wrong. Maybe that's one good thing about Morrowind -> Skyrim. No cutscenes anywhere.
heywood on 15/6/2018 at 19:15
A full motion cutscene is definitely one of the things you can't really pull off on the old hardware, although I agree with you that they are frequently overused.
And I’m surprised nobody mentioned online multi-player.
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Hooray for you, but technically a stealth game doesn't have to include any of those features. If the gameplay is built around evading enemy detection, it's a stealth game. Even the original 8-bit Castle Wolfenstein can be considered a stealth game.
The original question was which games that have come out during the last few years would have been possible on the 8-bit and 16-bit computers without losing most of what made them what they are?
If you want to say that having gameplay based on evasion represents most of what makes modern stealth games what they are, I disagree. I think that is unnecessarily reductionist, like boiling modern CRPGs down to Rogue.
Perhaps I should have used a more descriptive term than “stealth game”, though I can't think of another one that covers the range from Dishonored to Hitman to Neon Struct. It’s the combination of a three-dimensional world with realistic scale geometry rendered from an in-world perspective, environmental challenges, simulated physics and sound propagation, enemies and NPCs that act vaguely human like and occasionally do something emergent or unexpected – that all add up to make sneaking and evading suspenseful and challenging in a way that it’s not when you’re just looking down on the room and keeping your player on the other side of a door or rock from the enemy.
