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| No, BG&E did Stealth better than Metal Gear. by Mischief Maker 08/15/2011, 9:49pm PDT | ||||
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| I have no idea why, but for some reason everyone decided their games needed stealth after Thief came out, but all of them ignored Thief's innovations and took their cues from the 8-bit era.
Thief's levels (The good ones, Thief 1 had several levels where the designers lost their nerve) were large mansions and castles with multiple entry points littered with side rooms and hidden treasures. The level started out with you looking at a crudely-drawn map, buying optional tools you think you need for the job, and planning your route. If you fucked up and got spotted by a guard, you could haul ass and still manage to lose him by running away into the streets and reentering the mansion from another entryway. You had choices and control. Thief was built around the Aureal 3d soundcard, which used Nasa technology to simulate the relative positional sound of objects on headphones. I cannot emphasize enough how much immersion that brought to the game, sound oftentimes played a more important role in keeping tabs on your surroundings than vision, seeing as you were hiding from everything. Sound was also your enemy, as running across tile floor, even in a dark room, could bring suspicious guards with lanterns walking in from another room. There were rarely "safe spots" and navigating the levels unseen was an incredibly tense and exciting affair. In the horror levels, hiding from zombies and tracking their movement by the sound of them trying to breathe with their torn and rotten lungs, it made for a hell of a lot scarier experience than Silent Hill. Too bad Aureal lost out in the market to Sound blaster's inferior EAX technology. Beyond Good and Evil, and pretty much any other stealth game today, are corridor sneakers. Guards sit in place and make 90 degree turns at set intervals, or walk in small tightly choreographed patterns through a single room unaware of anything happening outside. So long as you stay behind their back, you're golden. It's a tiresome game of timing and pattern recognition. That's why Stealth has become a dirty word in the years after Thief, everyone wanted to capture the magic of the original game but weren't willing to put in the meticulous work crafting levels and AI routines to approach Thief's quality so they turned to that other stealth game of note which is way easier to emulate. |
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