I was chatting with David Uzumeri on Twitter recently about Bioshock on account of we were both playing the new DLC campaign for Bioshock Infinite, and I said I wished that all of the Bioshock games were, in fact, stealth games like Thief or even Dishonored (which is sort of a stealth-action first-person shooter). This is partially because I really like stealth games, but it’s also because stealth games, more than other games, require you to interact with the world around you: you have to really involve yourself with the environment, every table, fence and building becomes something you have to intimately know – this nook is safe to hide in, that cranny isn’t.
(It also means that good stealth games can immerse you into the world’s wider story in a way that feels far more organic than what Bioshock does with its “oh look the big bad of the game just happened to leave a diary recording of his nefarious plan here on this fruit stand” mechanic. Dishonored was particularly good about this: documents that you could sneak into rooms and read were always relevant to where you were and often didn’t have anything to do with your personal plotline while still being interesting.)
But why I particularly wish the Bioshock games were stealth games ties into the reason why I find most zombie games boring as sin. Stealth games make so much more sense when you are traveling through a world undergoing armageddon because during the end of a world, the tall grass gets mowed down. Why wouldn’t you want to sneak through a world where people with superpowers are trying to kill each other and also you? And this is of course why there are no truly great zombie video games that really capture the fearful aspect of zombies: they’re all action games like Left 4 Dead (which I really like, don’t get me wrong) or comedy-violence games like Dead Rising or Dead Island (which I really don’t like at all).
A zombie game that would be primarily about stealth would really make the problem with zombies plain: there’s more of them than there are of you, and they never get tired and they never stop coming, so the trick is to make sure they’re not coming for you. That game doesn’t exist yet and doesn’t appear to be coming. Instead, right now, the big thing is “build a base and defend it” zombie games, which also kind of miss the point: bases, in zombie stories, exist to be overrun. They’re honey traps for humans, that’s the point of bases.
(Day Z kind of got stealth gaming in zombie games right, but it’s also not fun because it’s an MMO and first off there’s all the PVP, which is just frustrating – and sandbox play doesn’t really work for a stealth game because at some point you have to get to your safe point, your stage end, and breathe out and relax. But War Z is at least a step in the right direction.)
Anyway, it’s just another of the many failures of Bioshock Infinite, which has to top my list of games that could have been so much more than they were but which I still play because what they are isn’t terrible by any means.
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Uzumeri.
Doesn’t The Last of US somewhat fit the bill?
Did you ever play Outcast? One of those games where the environment feels real and meaningful, but the mode of interaction was appropriate to your place in the world. Beautiful for its time.
State of Decay doesn’t necessitate a stealthy approach, but it certainly rewards it — there are wandering hordes which attack en masse if you are detected either in their (awful) field of vision or making enough noise (via car, loudly searching through residences, gunshot, or just yelling), and without backup, only the most seasoned player-character is going to take them down (usually with a hockey stick, in my experience). Using a gun out of desperation is usually the last nail in your coffin, because it just attracts twenty more zeds, and unless your weapon is suppressed, you can’t knock down more than you’ll summon.
But there’s also trash you can throw through windows to distract the undead, or alarm clocks to plant, or talking dolls that are nine kinds of creepy, or fireworks…all basically the same principle. The stealth is not fantastically rendered (zeds don’t have quite the deductive skills of an actual hunter) and you rarely (never?) face off against a human opponent, so it’s not nearly as fulfilled as, say, Thief or Dishonored, and even if you are spotted, it’s typically a matter of getting to a car (the best weapons in the game) to make a quick getaway or, my favorite strategy, start running them over in droves. Unless there’s a juggernaut zombie in the bunch, in which case escape is pretty much the only tactic.
SoD has a demo for the Xbox 360 and it’s on Steam (I think there’s a PC demo out there somewhere), and it’s as close as I can find to the “DayZ for single-player” that I’m looking for (because PvP is tedious).
But it was a shock to find out that the game progresses when you’re not playing it — days pass, resources are used, people get sick or go missing, morale fades — it can be a harrowing game. Next to The Walking Dead, it’s my favorite game of the moment.
Please tell me you meant to say DayZ, not WarZ AKA “Recently renamed to avoid people finding out it’s that horrifically bad game trying to skate off DayZ’s success”.
Yeah I think DayZ captures the stealth aspect of zombies really well, in that if you shoot at them you’ll just attract more, but if you don’t, they’ll eat you and they can eat you very easily. Eventually, almost every game of DayZ degenerates into panicked last stands around doorways (primarily because zombies have problems traversing doorways). Personally, I almost think ammo is a little too plentiful, but all things considered it’s perhaps the closest game I’ve seen to what you describe.
The best “zombie” game I’ve ever played is a Minecraft mod. There’s a post-apocalyptic custom map I installed that drops you right in the middle of a large city that’s been all but entirely stripped of any natural resources. Without trees, wood, or crops of any sort you have to desperately search buildings for anything useful. Problem is, most buildings have a spawner or three in them and are overrun with monsters. You end up really having to balance risk vs. reward.
It’s not exactly a stealth game as a result, but you do have to find creative ways to get in and out while confronting as few beasties as possible.
I spent the entirety of Bioshock Infinite wishing I could explore the world like in Dishonored or Deus Ex, I’m glad I wasn’t alone.
There’s the Forbidden Siren series from Japan, which is exactly that: stealth with zombies. They outnumber you, can work together, and can only be stunned, not killed. But it gives you the advantage of “sightjack” which allows you to see through their eyes to gain information about the layout and location of enemies in the stage. It can be really frustrating though, and sometimes unclear on the objectives.
It’s one of the more obscure titles as it failed to sell well in the states. Easiest one to obtain is Siren: Blood Curse, for the PS3.
State of decay is an almost example, as posted above by Sigma7, although it doesn’t quite fit since fighting zombies raises skills, and cars can take out entire mobs.
Zombie games are, and will be for the near future, hampered by the thing that should make them scary; numbers. Or in this case, the lack thereof. State of decay has a roving mob be about eight or ten zombies, while the zoombies in Left 4 Dead drop in a hit or two, and come in nice bite size hordes.
Someday, when processing power is strong enough, we can see real zombie hordes, ranging in the thousands and utterly ruining your day.
Myself, I think a good survival game would use werewolves instead of zombies. They are murder machines, transmute by bite, and during the day you have no idea who friend and foe are. There’s a good story there, methinks.
If undead must be used, use them all I say. Zombies, skeletons, ghouls, vampires, liches, this dawn of the dead would require a lot of good tactics and strategy, since many of those undead are as smart (or smarter) than the person chased.
The major problem with a lot of stealth games that game designers always seem to get wrong is that “stealth” in video games involves lots
and lots
and lots of tedious waiting. Waiting for enemies to go through patrols, waiting for the right moment to scurry out and do a takedown, dragging the body somewhere it won’t be seen, then ducking back into hiding and doing it all over again.
I mean, I’ve enjoyed stealth games before. The Thief series is still aces (though Thief 3 is a bit of a disappointment), Deux Ex: Human Revolution was fun, they aren’t bad by any means, but stealth in games has a distressing tendency to break up the flow of gameplay.
Dishonored helped get around this by, frankly, giving you the ability to quickly teleport all over the place like Nightcrawler. It helped make stealth a bit more proactive rather than a waiting game. Another example of good video game stealth implementation is actually the Batman: Arkham series of games, where the predator sections have you quickly moving from vantage to vantage, picking enemies off one by one, and you have a bunch of different gadgets and techniques to let you take an active approach to clearing a room full of guys without being seen.
Bioshock’s only problem: not enough sandbox openness. You’re kinda stuck doing missions rather than exploring and interacting.
Ok. I think I know of a game that fit the bill . The Walking Dead: Survival Instincts
Now hold on a minute, don’t bring the hammer on me for mentioning the *other* Walking Dead game, but hear me out. If you erase the Walking Dead iconography and the “rush to the door to cash in” feel of the game, you would find a good stealth based game with zombies. Before I sold the game back cuz you only got 1 maybe 2 playthroughs before it got tedious, the most fun I had was sneaking around the various locations, yelling SNEAK ATTACK when I knife a walker in the head, or letting out a soft whisper as I snipe a walker with my crossbow. Hell it’s because of that game and the corresponding show that convince me to get a crossbow for the house.
But, once again, I reiterate that the game isn’t good. But, it kinda fits the idea MGK had, doesn’t it?
Have you ever played sneak-based real-life kick-the-can as a child? If you have, you should know that such games are mainly about out-waiting the seeker in concealment before making a bold dash for the can, or to accomplish some other task.
Similarly, if you’ve ever served in a reconnaissance task in an armed service, you should know that moving close to the enemy is very slow. At an extreme, you may take an hour to cover a hundred meters. And when you are, finally, in position you desired, the waiting begins. Tedious, tedious waiting. On the one hand, it is dull and nothing happens. You strive to retain concentration and not to fall asleep. (You are sure to be tired, for you have not got enough sleep for days on end.) On the other hand, the sounds of nature (or habitation) are all around you, and they tend to grow in your mind into other people sneaking towards you. You are alone, or only with a buddy, both in incomfortable position and vulnerable to a sudden attack. Yet you cannot move into a more defensible location without endangering the actual mission. Not freaking out is equally important than not falling asleep.
Sneaking is, in reality, much more difficult and much more tedious than in any game I’ve played.
Yes, and? Other things that are much more difficult and tedious than in any game include everything in any game ever.
I admit I’m a little confused, is this supposed to be an argument in favor of the way most stealth games operate? Because “Reality is really boring so it’s fine that games are only kinda sorta boring” isn’t a tremendously convincing argument, sorry. Unless you’re designing some sort of sneaking simulator then I don’t particularly care how boring actual real-world sneaking is, I care about how fun the game I’m playing is. Sitting around and waiting for the AI guard to finally turn around so you can move up ten feet and then wait around five minutes to do it all over again is not exciting gameplay. Doing a DX:HR stealth run, which the game rewards you for with more XPs to buy more cybertoys, was an absolute slog in places to where I finally said “fuck it” and just started running around like a cyberninja, shooting and stabbing people and you know what? It was a lot more fun that way.
There are better, more proactive, and more engaging ways of handling stealth gameplay than the traditional method of “lots of crouching behind boxes and waiting for the AI to move into the right position.”
Almost unrelated but still awesome: Dishonored was $10 on Xbox Live yesterday, so I finally got it. Me gusta.
A lot of Last of Us is like this, especially on survival mode. When you’ve only got three bullets and a half broken shiv, you do anything you can to avoid combat. I spent a lot of time cowering behind cars, trying to gauge exactly when to throw a bottle to distract a horde long enough to get to the next building. Running away was also a good tactic.
Mark of the Ninja is a really good example of non-zombie stealth too.
@Kai, you were playing DE:HR wrong if the stealth approach was that tedious. The stealth approach is maxing out energy recharge and cloaking, and just running from cover to cover. You didn’t wait for guards to turn around, you waited for your energy to recharge so you could run again.
I’d have done that more if candy bars weren’t literally a finite resource and your energy actually recharged all the way up to full instead of “here, have a tiny segment back, time to scarf down some more Creatine if you want more.” DX:HR was a game with a lot of questionable design decisions, honestly.
Its not stealth but I really enjoyed the early game atmosphere in RDR Undead Nightmare. Scrounging bullets from ammo belts, relying on horse to outrace mobs, etc
Well I think The Walking Dead game does count here, as while it is a point and click adventure, a lot of the mechanics do involve stealth.
In fact, when you do actively engage with zombie mobs well….there’s a specific reason. It does bring home the sense of threat.