Have you ever noticed that in "sneaker" games such as Hitman 2 or Theif 2 it's often easier to go in guns blazing Rambo style than it is to actually try and sneak?

For example, in the Theif 2 manual it goes on and on about how you can't succeed at attacking large groups of enemies "directly" and they try to make your swordplay crappy by having Garret move really slowly when his sword is out, to the point that it seems more effective to prance around with the blackjack and repeatedly whack guards on the forehead with that until they die than it does to engage them with the sword.

Problems with game systems usually emerge when someone tries something that is 1.) unexpected and 2.) extreme. See weird min-maxing in table top RPGs. I believe that usually "sneaker" games are tweaked so that when the sneaking player is discovered by the enemies and they all descend on him like a ton of bricks he's got a chance of surviving instead of that being an automatic death sentence. Ergo, things must be balanced so that if the player is disadvantageously attacked by numerous NPCs he can still possibly survive.

Because of that I find that in both T2 and HM2 it's actually a lot easier to complete the levels in most cases by simply outright attacking the enemy NPCs in a tactical way, i.e. finishing them off quickly and positioning yourself so that they can't all get at you at once. By trying to stealth past lots of NPCs you're effectively entering a trap. But by blowing them all away in a systematic manner you remove the need for stealth entirely.

It is easier to kill off each small pockets of opposition than to try to get around them all. But I think that the games also make it harder to go in with all your guns blazing. Instead of "sneak, sneak, sneak, oh shit", you go "sneak, kill, sneak, kill, sneak, kill". For example, on Recon missions in Ghost Recon, I never go sneak sneak sneak, I always go sneak kill sneak kill sneak kill.

I've thought about this too.

Coming up with a solution to this is extremely difficult, nigh impossible.

besides the obvious "You fail automatically" when discovered, there really is no way to balance a solution to both problems.

I haven't really played any of the Splinter Cell series that much, can anyone comment on them?

I can state for a fact that the gameplay in Crysis is completely broken.

Yes, Crysis makes it -way- too easy to cloak, run around someone, uncloak, kill them, cloak, run behind the next guy, and repeat. Of course on the flip side, when you -don't- have cloak up it is like you have a freaking neon sign or something. I've been shot at, and hit, by guys with heavy machine guns at distances that are hard to manage with the 10x zoom sniper rifle.

Splinter cell tends to be that you either go through with the 'sneak kill sneak kill' ideal, or you have a 'you get caught, you lose' requirement.

And if you think about it, this makes sense from a real world perspective. It is -much- easier to sneak past a bunch of corpses then it is to sneak past living people. One of the many fixes for this is that when the guy you killed doesn't report in all the alarms go off, everything is locked down, and shit hits the fan. Which isn't really much better then the 'you get found you lose' option. Honestly I've always thought that all 'sneaking' games are -way- to lenient about sounding alerts. You can often shoot a guy, miss, hide, and he'll eventually not only -not- sound an alarm, but compleately forget about you. And of course it is a requirement to become a guard that you can explain away anything you see or hear as 'just my imagnination' or 'I must be seeing/hearing things.'

If I ever have to hire guards they will travel in pairs, maybe even groups of three, have erratic patrol patterns, will be required to look over their sholder often, and will have no form of demntia in which they believe that they hear and see things all the time.

Oh, and when cameras start malfunctioning in a pattern that looks like someone could be walking in a particular direction, they will sound the freaking alarm.

It really depends on what kind of "sneaker" game you're talking about. For example, I've found that in general sneaking is a lot better in the, say, Tenchu games, but in those you leave a trail of death in your wake while sneaking.

~J