Recently Dishonored has gotten some negative press for pandering to the inept people that seem to populate their testers, and today brings more disheartening news. According to Eurogamer, Arkane has stated that the reason for the lack of shadow hugging stealth mechanics is because they felt it wasn’t realistic enough, which is what they are going for.
In Thief the light is very very important. At the beginning we tried to be in the same mood: use the light, use the shadows.
But we realized that when you’re standing in front of an NPC like this [hand in front of face] it’s not realistic – we must admit that. In the real world it’s not like this.
“As we are a bit perfectionist, we wanted it to work as in Thief and very realistically. With these two notions we got crazy and decided to eliminate the light parameters, because it was too difficult to have both.”
I would say that this is faulty logic on Arkane’s part, but there was also a secondary, and slightly more legitimate, reason for the lack of a shadowy world.
“You might have noticed that our artists went kind of crazy to create the most detailed and interesting world,” said Dinga Bakaba, game designer and associate producer, “so it was kind of contradictory to put some pitch black areas where you can’t see very well.”
Again, I believe Arkane is using faulty logic to make this conclusion. Take Bioshock for example. Much of the game was shrouded in shadow that obscured the wonderful art style of the game, but it fit the mood. There is more to the artistic style of a game than just the visuals, there is also the mood set by the environment (e.g. the Silent Hill franchise).
Art style aside, how difficult would it be to add destroyable light sources, or put some magic in to extinguish fire based light sources? And really, how much of a perfectionist are you being if you don’t have destroyable light sources in a stealth game? Hell even Metro 2033 had them and it isn’t even technically a stealth game.
What upsets me about this isn’t that they don’t use shadows for stealth, it’s that the reasoning behind it is poor and says “We’re to lazy to make this happen.” I seriously doubt that this is going to affect the game terribly, but this is just another instance of an excellent but niche genre of games being streamlined and cut-down instead expanded on.
Quotes from Eurogamer.net
God, this game looked so exciting at E3, but it seems like every time I’ve heard about it since then, it just keeps sounding more and more disappointing.
Please stop referring to Arkane as “Bethesda”; you of all people should know the difference between a developer and publisher.
Hell, the Eurogamer article even refers to Arkane, the word “Bethesda” doesn’t even appear in the fucking article.
Whoops, I can’t believe I used Bethesda, I have no idea what I was thinking, totally my bad. Updating to Arkane.
It has already been confirmed Dishonored DOES take shadows into account for the stealth.
I would recommend you get your facts right before copypasting EuroGamer.
“The AIs have several viewcones. The main one ignores light and shadow. Peripheral and long-distance cones however do take shadow into account. ”
http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1413778-dishonored-and-the-lightshadow-system/
I thought so. Everyone here is just jumping to conclusions. I think they meant that you can’t just hide in a shadow and a person two inches away won’t notice.
Get out of here with your “logic” and “facts”.
You and your damned facts.
Really though, I obviously didn’t research this properly. Thanks for catching my mistake and posting that information.
What’s even more stupid is that it’s perfectly plausible to have both lighting-based hiding and proximity detection programmed into the AI. I believe Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory would have characters detect you if they got closer 20cm or so even in total darkness. Completely realistic? Well, maybe not, but acceptably believable. Maybe they heard your breathing or could smell you, or something like that.
Of course, there are reports of soliders passing within inches of ghillied scouts and not noticing them, but that’s arguably a different sort of case.
I actually think Arkane is onto something with that first quote. That always bugged me about stealth games. Like in MGS (the first anyways) sound wasn’t a factor. As long as you didn’t enter a guard’s vision cone you were completely invisible. Velvet Assassin had the shadow thing going on. Nazi’s would pass inches from you and be completely oblivious to your existence as long as you were in a shadow and remained stationary.
But light can also add a lot to a game. I don’t think there has to be extremes. As in, if you’re in light you’re visible and in darkness you’re invisible.
MGS 4 did it just fine. Shadow reduced enemy vision, but they didn’t become blind and stupid in darkness.
You should play Thief the Dark Project. Sound manipulation was half the gameplay. The other half was visibility through lighting & hiding behind geometry.
Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah had horrible stealth mechanics, and Arcane is making an entire game revolving around stealth? Arx Fatalis did magic interestingly and Dark Messiah had some really solid combat mechanics. Neither did stealth right.
I’ve avoided gameplay videos about it because I would rather experience it for myself but I gotta admit, I’m starting to get worried the more I hear about it.
There is footage of a player putting out torches/candles in Dishonored. I think it does take light level into account, you just can’t crouch in a corner and magically be invisible..
why are they worrying about realism in a game with magic powers?
I assume shadow stealth action never came up during development and they don’t want to shoo horn in the mechanics since it wouldn’t be properly balanced. Who knows though.
Also,”I seriously doubt that this is going to affect the game terribly, but this is just another instance of an excellent but niche genre of games being streamlined and cut-down instead expanded on.”
Deus Ex never had shadow stealth either.
Yes, it did actually. If the player was making noise in a darkened area in the original Deus Ex NPCs didn’t usually see you.
You could shoot out lights in Metro?
Welp, time for another playthrough I guess.
Not only can you shoot out light bulbs in Metro 2033, but the AI will react to seeing them go out, or to hearing breaking glass if they didn’t see it. Not only that, if they think someone is taking out light sources, they turn on their night-vision goggles, if they have any.
“What upsets me about this isn’t that they don’t use shadows for stealth, it’s that the reasoning behind it is poor and says “We’re to lazy to make this happen.” I seriously doubt that this is going to affect the game terribly, but this is just another instance of an excellent but niche genre of games being streamlined and cut-down instead expanded on.”
Exactly. They are saying, in effect, “I’m sorry, it’s not realistic for our rat summoning, teleporting, time stopping, body possessing, wind controlling, wall seeing through protagonist to do that because it’s not like that in the real world.”