T w e n t y S i d e d

Like a lot of people, I missed the hint from your companions that you’re supposed to stare down the librarians. On one hand, this is a great mechanic. The stare-down is unnerving and reinforced what Khan had to say about thinking before shooting. On the other hand, I think it was way too easy to miss (a lot of people missed it, not just me) and an uninformed player might easily find themselves unable to proceed because there aren’t enough bullets to kill all the librarians.

Lucky for me, I was using the volt driver and had bought a massive stockpile of ammo many stops earlier. I was fine in this section of the game, despite getting hilariously turned around and confused at a couple of points.

I think a lot of the problems with the library boil down to malfunctions or mis-communications with two important mechanics: The staring and the gas masks. Both are interesting, both reinforce the themes and atmosphere of the game, and both lead to awful game-killing failure states if the player messes up.

While I don’t think there are simple answers for these issues, here are my own suggestions for how I’d try to alleviate them:

1) I think that the staring mechanic needed more than one mention. Lots of people (myself included) seemed to miss it because their character was gasping for air on a low filter, thus drowning out the NPC’s. Either that, or they were running around looting. (Perhaps trying to grab all the stuff before the next camera-grab cutscene shoved them through a one-way door.) I think it would have been good to have a conversation about the librarians earlier in the game, preferably someplace where the player wouldn’t have a gas mask on.

2) Assuming we can’t snap our fingers and make Polis a full city (alas) then I’d suggest putting the shop AFTER the council meeting. When the player rolls into town, the next item on their list is “attend meeting”. When they exit the meeting, they know (roughly) where they are going and can plan accordingly. It’s one thing if the NPC offers the player some friendly advice to buy filters. It’s another thing if that player is properly informed (and not completely distracted by a new town) when the advice is given.

I notice both of these fixes involve Polis. I really suspect that Polis needed to be cut for budget reasons and as a result we ended up with these rough spots as a side-effect.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I can understand why the developer would want to cutscene through Polis. It’s a massive space and making it available to the player would have been expensive. You need collision hulls to keep the player from jumping out of the level. You need to populate it with people. You need to voice and lip-sync at least SOME of the people so it doesn’t feel like everyone has been lobotomized. People need to be animated so they aren’t rigid. You’d need to make a couple of new art assets because having the exact same bar with the exact same arrangement of posters in two different towns would likely be immersion-breaking. You’d also need some shopkeepers and sales chatter. (I don’t mean the gun vendors. I mean like the food vendors we see in other towns.)

If you’re worried about budget, Polis is probably the most sensible place to cut corners. Having said that, it really did sting to spend the entire game getting here only to be carried through by cutscene rails.

It’s probably hard to tell from our footage, but the cutscenes are really annoying. The game cuts you loose to shop, but if you get too close to your friend (like, maybe you were hoping to look at the OTHER half of this tiny room?) then it grabs your camera and begins the cutscene that shoves you out of town. It doesn’t even have the decency to give you a “are you ready?” prompt. The shopping is the only interactivity in all of Polis. The rest is cutscene.

A shame, really. Understandable, but a shame.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The Freddie Wong video we mentioned is here: Splinter Cell: Lightbulb Assassin. This ties in nicely with the conversation we had about stealth in Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light. And really, it also relates to stealth in just about every stealth-optional shooter. The stealth is often silly, absurd nonsense.

I think the reason for this is that it’s prohibitively difficult to make stealth mechanics that are both sensible and fun. Stealth is complex and involves a lot of fussing with AI. If I was actually guarding a single dark room all by myself for hours, I would very likely be extremely sensitive to even the slightest sounds. I’d notice if a door was open, a chair was moved, a light was off, a shadow moved, or a friend was missing. I’d hear someone (particularly a grown man with a lot of gear) hitting the ground in the next room. And if anything spooked me I’d likely keep my back to the wall and turn on every light at my disposal. If not out of a sense of duty, then out of a sense of self-preservation and a desire to fill the time. I mean, I literally have nothing else to do. And even if I didn’t find any enemies, I’d be paranoid for the rest of my shift.

And of course, knocking out a human being in a single non-lethal blow is incredibly difficult. It’s very unlikely anyone could do it reliably and silly to imagine they could do it silently. There is no way a full-grown man in combat gear could slink around silently in an unfamiliar building while carrying three full-sized firearms, particularly when the inhabitants are bored, jumpy, and intimately familiar with the space. And if the place is made of crumbling concrete and creaking wood? And everyone spends their days worrying about monsters and ghosts? No way.

But none of this matters. Sneaking around in the dark and knocking people out makes for really fun gameplay. It adds tension. It has a lot of interesting mechanical trade-offs between safety and expediency. It usually adds another whole dimension to what would otherwise be a monotonous shooter. There are already well-established rules for how these systems work and most players have kind of made peace with these contrivances. It’s understood and expected that guards will walk predictable routes, that they will talk to themselves to communicate their current mental state to the player, and that they will drop back into patrol mode after only a minute or two. None of this is realistic, but it’s unrealistic in a familiar way and so it doesn’t shatter immersion the same way that unrealistic but unexpected behavior will.

The point is: It would be incredibly difficult to make stealth realistic, and if you somehow succeeded then it would probably just make stealth gameplay impossible or boring.

So any would-be game designer has to design their game knowing that somewhere, SOMETHING is going to not make any dang sense. Some part of stealth has got to be a silly contrivance.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.