Thursday, January 25, 2007

Real Stealth

Why is it that MMORPG rogues are able to hide in plain daylight as well as during the night? Why is it that games artificially boost a rogue's stealth ability? I think that the ability of a sneaky person to get past others should be based on them not being noticeable, so passing behind guards is a must or, if impossible, at least using shadows to conceal oneself.

That being said, it would introduce into the game something that developers seem to dislike, that of using the player's skills for something. To enjoy a fully functional stealth system, you would need to have the player decide on where to go, unless you decide to use some fuzzy path finding technology that technomagically makes the character decide on the best path to take. Not only that, but you would need players to actually be paying attention to what is happening around them, as well as prevent third-party scripts from automatically detecting invisible stuff.

So, without artificially boosting a rogue's invisibility, the stealthy players will have to find environments in which they can meld, typically shadows (unless they buy points in invisibility spells, of course, but let's not get there); and players would have to pay attention to their surrounding to avoid being ambushed. So, in essence, it just gives player a more realistic experience of fantasy warfare, instead of relying on random number generators to do all the job. I don't think that's all bad; it's just different from what the hardcore gamers are used to, and these people are pretty vocal in their disapprobation, so we might not see realistic stealth in a MMORPG any time soon. At least it's fun to dream, isn't it?

No comments: