Stealth games get a bad rap sometimes and not without a reason.
A lot of them are pretty terrible and have no idea what they're doing.
We did an Extra Credits episode a while back about the good and the bad of stealth game design
and I recommend you check that one out. But here's the short version:
stealth is about making waiting fun.
Good stealth games use waiting as a sort of puzzle solving exercise
turning the fixtures in the levels and the actions of the guards
into the puzzle pieces the players working with.
Great stealth games also make messing up engaging.
The penalty for failure in a stealth game is usually a loss of time
which risks being pretty grating on the player who is already doing plenty of waiting.
As a designer, it's our job to find ways to make this penalty something you don't want to have happened
yet still create a compelling enough minigame that you get lost in the moment
trying to get away from the guards or finding just the right place to hide
rather than noticing that we're just making you waste more time because you messed up.
In typical Design Club fashion, I want to take a deep dive
into how a specific game uses these mechanics and makes something awesome.
So today, we'll be looking at Klei's Mark of the Ninja
and how they made a stealth gem into something accessible and exciting for tons of players.
The most radical departure Mark of the Ninja makes from the normal stealth genre
is collapsing the game into a 2D perspective.
By reducing the game to two dimensions, information becomes much more accessible.
You can look at it like an actual map.
Every path, vent, guard and hiding place is visible to the player.
The intention is to give the player access to the information required to make decisions.
Making the game 2D streamlines the aspect of stealth gameplay
where a player has to assess their environment.
Whenever the player is waiting, the clarity of options a 2D space gives you
essentially simplifies their puzzle solving.
All of your options are available for you to ponder without having to search for them.
Not having to search for that information gets the player to the good part of the game much faster
figuring out how to execute your next move.
But Mark of the Ninja takes a few other departures from standard stealth gameplay that increases its accessibility.
For starters, look at the visibility system.
It's completely binary.
A lot of other stealth games will put how visible you are on a gradient, or not show you at all
making unclear whether or not you're actually in stealth.
But Mark of the Ninja uses an all-or-nothing system.
You're either in shadow, or you're in light
and the game has pretty distinct visual cues as well to make sure that this is apparent.
The designer applies the same clarity to how the game handles the sounds you make.
Any sound that could a guard alert makes a visible ring
so you know how far it will travel and who will hear it whatever it is you're doing.
On a similar note, watch the guard AI.
Any time a guard's status changes, the game makes it very apparent.
You always know exactly how aware of you a specific guard is.
By allowing the player more foreknowledge of what will happen
they can avoid forcing the player to have to repeatedly run away or wait out a timer.
Now, failure is an inevitable part of most games.
How each game handles the player's errors is key and doubly so in stealth games.
If waiting is an important setup to the encounter
being forced to repeat that waiting can be even more frustrating than usual.
In addition, when your game is trying to sell on the fantasy of being a badass ninja
player mistakes tend to stick out like a sore thumb.
The stealth game tropes that Mark of the Ninja does away with
are in service of keeping the waiting down and the barrier to the awesome ninja club low.
Mark of the Ninja opts to remove as much ambiguity from their systems as possible
with the intent of eliminating player mistakes due to unclear information.
When a player makes a mistake in a stealth game that they couldn't have seen coming, that's frustrating.
It's the game cheated somehow.
You don't feel like a ninja. You feel like a person playing a bad game.
But when all of the information exists in front of you and you still fail
that feels like it's your fault
that it's something that you could improve on if you try it again.
Mark of the Ninja also seeks to subvert the price of failure in more conventional ways.
The game gives checkpoints before basically every encounter.
Load times between them are instant
and the players is always two clicks away from resetting the level on their own terms
allowing them to always be facing a challenge that's relevant to them
rather than having to slog back through content they've already done.
You could certainly make the argument that all of these changes caused the game lose
some of the difficulty normally associated with stealth games.
However, I'd argue that the core aesthetic of the game falls more on the side of fantasy.
Mark of the Ninja's design centers around delivering the feeling of being a ninja
and as such, the game systems are crafted around that idea
trying to make it accessible to everyone
rather than forcing people to attain an incredible amount of skill at the game
before they can pull off all those truly ninja-like moves.
I think that about wrap it up for now, but this episode is by no means exhaustive.
Play through some of the game yourself and compare it to other stealth titles.
Why did Mark of the Ninja make the choices it did?
And if you come up with anything that we didn't mention, talk about it in the comments.
See you later.