Sulphur on 15/6/2018 at 19:28
I don't know, that's a lot of words that boil down to '3D worlds presented in first person are my preference for stealth'. You're free to prefer that, of course, and the sense of immersion that the perspective offers, but it's not technically impossible for a 16-bit game to do that. If the SNES could do Doom (and Starfox/SF2 albeit with an additional chip in the cart), I'm pretty sure it could do a rudimentary stealth game in the vein of Thief. It's just that, well, no one tried that and I doubt it would have been much fun without analogue sticks. Philosophical differences on whether 3PP stealth games are immersive or not aside (they can be and routinely are, and anyone saying otherwise is wrong :mad:), there's a reason why games like MGS and Tenchu showed up during the PSX era.
heywood on 15/6/2018 at 21:28
Both of you guys are picking one feature of these games, ZB says evasion, you say 3D, and arguing that the one thing you picked existed back on the old consoles. In both cases, I think you are reducing what modern stealth games are to an almost absurd degree. Somebody could make a Doom mod where you hide and evade instead of shoot, and it would meet your criteria but it would be missing most of what makes these games good. Just a few of the things that would be missing:
- Convincing AI behavior
- Semi-realistic sound propagation, and how it affects player and enemy situational awareness
- Realistic architecture
- Vertical exploration
- Object physics
- Manipulation of the environment to affect AI behavior or gameplay options
- Interaction of systems that allows for creative or emergent gameplay
On older 8-bit or 16-bit hardware, you could maybe pick a couple specific things to model in a rudimentary simulation, but that wouldn't be enough to add up to a rudimentary facsimile of game like Dishonored. Neon Struct already whittled it down to its most minimal form. Anything less than that isn't the same type of game.
ZylonBane on 16/6/2018 at 01:40
You realize, you could use that same argument to prove that no genres of games existed on 8/16-bit consoles, except maybe puzzle games.
icemann on 16/6/2018 at 11:53
Inline Image:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FIqH88FFJTk/maxresdefault.jpgAbove is how top down 2D stealth works. You don't need 3D for it to be stealth. It all comes together just fine.
The basic mechanics of it is exactly the same. Enemy + line of sight = whether player is detected or not.
henke on 16/6/2018 at 14:39
As someone who was introduced to and fell in love with stealth games through Commandos, I'd like to add my name to the long list of people who think heywood is being silly. Even in recent years some of the best stealth games have used a "God's eye view": Invisible Inc. and Shadow Tactics. That kind of gameplay would certainly be possible to recreate on 16-bit systems.
Twist on 16/6/2018 at 15:13
Gunpoint fulfills most of his detailed list of requirements, and that game could have been done in the 16-bit era.
Sulphur on 16/6/2018 at 15:16
Yep. And Gunpoint is a pretty great game, it must be said. (Because it ought to be said as often as possible.)
Pyrian on 16/6/2018 at 17:38
I feel like we're arguing over what constitutes an immersive sim again, except without the "immersive sim" part.
heywood on 16/6/2018 at 21:42
OK, forget about stealth. I don't think Gunpoint satisfies any of the characteristics I've mentioned, but I'm obviously failing to get my point across, so I give up. Re: immersive sims, I don't want to drag that into it.
I just feel like people are ignoring the point of Thirith's topic, which is to take a modern game and think about how much you can whittle away before the experience just isn't the same anymore. You can go Jony Ive on steroids and say that all a shooter needs is a gun and baddies to shoot at, so Doom Eternal can be simplified down to Berzerk. And you may think you can do that without losing most of what makes Doom Eternal the game it is, but to me it's an absurd argument.
icemann on 17/6/2018 at 02:39
And he didn't even bother to look at the screenshot. Tsk tsk.
