This thought occurred to me while playing CP2077, but it's prevalent in a TON of games - instant kills by sneaking up behind enemies.
I usually play stealthy if given the option, I find it more fun than just wading through people in an ocean of blood, but this mechanic is almost game breaking in most places it appears. No matter how outgunned you are, all you have to do is wait til the enemy NPCs backs are turned for an instant, low-risk kill. Sure, some games make you grab them first before the kill, leaving a slight window where you can be spotted by another enemy or whatever, but with the tiniest modicum of planning that risk is almost nil.
In the case of CP2077, the stealth kill is available right from the start as well, so for someone like me who likes to play the stealthy way, there's barely any reason to spec into any other shit (except for the abilities which make it easier for me to sneak around dudes for the instant kill, lol).
If instant stealth kills weren't a thing, there'd be much more challenge in trying to ACTUALLY be stealthy, i.e. sneaking around enemies without killing/incapacitating them, completing your objective, then sneaking back out unseen. Of course, there are some games that reward this playstyle (MGS for example). But plenty of other games (including '77, not trying to dunk on it exclusively it's just freshest in my mind) will give you bonus rewards for "not leaving a trace behind" (i.e. not having a combat alert) when you've actually left a trail of snapped necks.
I don't really know what I'd like to see instead - I guess games where there's better application of stealth are usually ones that are designed with the stealthy playstyle from the ground up (the Arkham series, MGS). And I appreciate they're trying to give you a reward for creeping up on people, but like I said, it's almost game breaking with its effectiveness in most games. What do y'all think?
The sneak skill in Elder Scrolls games is so stupid that I'd miss it if it were gone.
Guard with arrow in his head: "Must have been the wind..."
MGS is a good example, and it shows what the main difference to "necksnapper" stealth action is: The guards in the MGS titles i've played didn't just stand around and waited until you crept out of your murder bush to do medically questionable choke holds, they all acted like an actual perimeter defense, regularly reporting on their radio that everything's clear - and if you took them out, somebody would get suspicious because they didn't respond to calls anymore and they'd send in backup to check what's wrong. The games made it abundantly clear that you're supposed to avoid and bypass guards, not just fight them faster and sneakier, and it was fun to figure out a safe route, hiding spots, distractions etc. So the difference was both a more realistic behavior of the mobs, a wide array of options to deal with them non-violently, and a level design conducive to the resulting gameplay.
I liked that a lot, but i agree that it was due to the game being focussed entirely on a stealth approach. A cyberpunk game should, in my opinion, have both options be viable. Elaborate heists are a core part of the genre, but so is over the top, guns blazing ultraviolence. I guess fully supporting both play styles all the time isn't realistic, but it seems plausible to have missions for both. When you're a criminal for hire in a cyberpunk setting, it makes perfect sense that sometimes, you do runs that are meant to be done 100% stealthy, where nobody realizes they've been compromised, but also hit jobs where everything's supposed to go up in a giant fireball.
Your last point is such a good one. Big open world RPGs these days seem obsessed with making it possible for players to do EVERYTHING in one play through. Why shouldn’t there be missions that are only accessible/completable if you’re specced in the right way? (Thats without getting into why they feel like they need to let players go down almost every story branch, no matter how contradictory, in a single playthrough).
It would add replayability, while making the actual gameplay more fun. It would also help with the problem of these games just being big maps with dots you have to cross off, if some of those dots aren’t achievable in every playthrough. Would make your character roll feel a bit more unique.
Hello I am leader of the companions, leader of the dawn guard, leader of the theives guild, leader of the dark brotherhood, dragon born, savior of skyrim, Thane to every city in skyrim, and a werewolf.
100%. Sure, it’s a video game, some parts of it have to be “gamey”, like “oops I walked into this dude’s line of sight, luckily I have two seconds before the meter fills before he’s actually seen me”. But the instant kill feels cheap. I know i could just not use it, but it’s so central to the play style.
I don’t know how you’d improve the mechanic. For a start I’d do away with being able to instantly kill anyone when you don’t even have a weapon equipped. If you’re unarmed in an enemy controlled area it should be about evasion at all costs imo.
Is it Skyrim where you have to unlock perks that eventually end in 10x damage from behind while sneaking? Something like that is better than an instant kill on any enemy that you have unlocked from the start of the game, lol. It’s still dependant on your weaponry and other stats and the enemy’s too.
Stealth is just so half-assed and tacked on in most games. I appreciate that so far Cyberpunk is at least letting me do things in an entirely sneaky manner for the most part, plenty of games will let you be stealthy to a certain degree and then railroad you into a big gunfight.
The perk you're thinking of in Skyrim is assassin's blade. It gives you some ridiculously high crit multiplier but only when wielding a dagger. It could be combined with shrouded handwraps to deal like X25 damage on a sneak attack, so while it is practically a one hit kill you have to specialise specifically into stealth kills.
Edit: for some reason autocorrect changed hit to guy.
Ah, the MSGV level of ghosting. If you press the one trigger (on an Xbox controller) then the mission is no longer ghost, essentially.
Yeah, there's an annoying tendency to count reaper playthroughs as ghost, or no-kill-no-detect runs.
Prep work & level design. Players should be able to front-load stealth, and be confident in the payoff. Like doping the soup pot. Currently stealth prep is a janky afterthought. Rather prep should come first, with the sneak being the back-up and prone to fail (trade-off for not prepping). I think the idea of planning a heist is appealing, not just sneaking one off that the game delivers to you.
What really bothers me with stealth in cyberpunk is that sneaking up to rub the guys back is an instantkill but sneaking up behind him to shoot him in the head with my silenced pistol just makes the enemies pissed off and suddenly alerts the entire building to my presence. Same with hacking. At least give us more options for our stealth missions than just forcing me to slowly walk up to everyone. I want to silently take people down at distance too
100% agree. I spec’d into stealth damage and handguns, but still have a 50/50 chance of downing the guy with a headshot or alerting the entire enemy garrison if the shot doesn’t crit. Then again a guaranteed one hit kill is literally what this post is complaining about lol.
So then the question is “how do you do stealth without IK, but without failure to kill in one shot instantly blowing the mission?” Hard to thread that needle in a way that isn’t contrived.
I really liked the way this was handled back in the Thief series; you had to be really almost absurdly careful about whether people could see you, dead bodies are instant red alert, sound was easy to alert with too, etc Because the whole game was built around it none of it was too easy and screwing up and getting guards alerted on you was pretty much always going to overwhelm you and kill you.
for most of the games that include it alongside just killing everyone it's definitely almost game breaking but I feel like the just kill everyone way of getting through them is also usually just as boring/easy so it's kinda just the whole game not really making it's mechanics particularly important either way. and with those, it's really just more about having options for the kinda choose your own adventure part of what is otherwise basically just an interactive movie.
The Dishonored series did it really well too. There was something about the autohide under tables that just felt so smooth to me. That and how basically everything in the game was traversable and you actually could solve the missions in like 10 different ways
For sure. As much as “misdirect guard, sneak around, snap neck” might not be the most exciting gameplay loop, at least you have to scope out the area and form SOME kind of plan versus going in guns blazing. At that point you might as well just be playing COD.
I only played the most recent thief, I thought it was pretty decent but I never finished it, no reason, just fell off it at some point. Had nice progression and mission structure I thought, didn’t overdo the open world stuff like a lot of games do these days ahem
I feel like it would be fine if the AI responded better to finding bodies or maybe they could notice missing . Some guards are essentially senile.
The worst are the ones like Skyrim or Far Cry, where the guards find one of their companions bloodily murdered, freak out for 30 seconds, then start high fiving each other and saying "guess the intruder must have run away!".
I love stealth games, but in reality most of them are about spamming quicksave as make your way through areas.
I feel attacked haha.
The more I think about this and some of the responses, really just makes me appreciate how well MGS has handled some of this stuff. It’s hard to just save scum in MGSV for example because resetting to checkpoints affects your mission ranking, the mechanics of the game itself encourage perfect stealth.
Put some actual risk into it. Like say, in Payday 2, you can only do 3 stealth kills before the guards realize something is going on. There could also be a mechanic where there's a chance to fail it. I mean, these are combat trained guards, surely they are at least somewhat able to defend against a choke hold or being attacked from behind.
You might enjoy Invisible Inc. Most weapons only knock guards out for a couple of turns, and once they get up they'll be alert and actively hunting you. You can find lethal weapons but they're often more trouble than they're worth, they raise the alert level when you use them which often means more guards are called in anyway. You have to rely more on watching the guards' patrols, carefully managing your resources for hacking, and finding the right balance between speed and caution to get you through the level before things go haywire. It's different from some of the games you mentioned in that it's turn-based but it's definitely still a stealth game and I find that having time to contemplate how fucked you are as you weigh your options just adds to the tension.
There's a setting where it can give you I think 5 days before the final mission. The expansion is also pretty good, and extends it with a tough midgame mission at day 3 and then a couple more days with a bit of a switcheroo of stuff after it, really gives it a better flow and your agents are completely insane by the end.
Unskippable cutscenes. Better yet, there should be an option to skip all dialogue.
I saw a pretty good implementation of this mechanic recently in Partisans 1941. In the game, you can perform knife kills, but the success of that kill depends on the melee skill of the character. So if I were to sneak a partisan with only 1 melee skill and try to stab a Wehrmacht officer, then the officer would win the fight. Also, the knife attack always produces a loud struggle, so even if you kill an enemy and win, the noise might have caught the suspicions of others. I feel like it's pretty well done, no attack is without risk, and extra planning has to done to not get caught and killed.
Yeh, I am basing this off only 8-10 hours of playtime tbf, it could expand a little.
Adding to your final point, I also think there’s just an irreconcilable contradiction in these big, open world, AAA releases at this point. You can’t pay for Keanu to be in your game and then make his quest line a missable portion of the story. You can’t pump time and money into big cinematic set pieces and then not railroad every player into seeing them. But those things eat away at the whole reason to make a big open RPG in the first place. But I can also see why developers want to make games with those things in em. It’s quite a pickle.
It's not feasible in games like Cyberpunk. Stealth has to be balanced with guns-blazing gameplay. If you make stealth significantly worse then almost everybody will just start shooting instead. There will be a small group of people who'll do stealth basically regardless of how good it is, but you can't game design around a small minority of gamers. The best you can usually do for this type of game is add basic option stealth gameplay that smoothly transitions to FPS, i.e. you can snap a few necks to start out with and then start shooting when the alarm gets raised.
Stealth gameplay is especially hard to design because it requires a lot of effort in level design. You can't just design the stealth gameplay-loop once and call it a day, you have to integrate stealthy gameplay in every area you add. This is why you can't add good stealth to every game, it's too labor-intensive to add if only a few people will benefit from it.
This is why just about all the games with good stealth are dedicated stealth games. You design each area with stealth in mind since that's how all the gamers will be playing and you make your combat options shitty so you're forced to play in stealth mode the whole time.
