The Press Box - Ep. 211: 'Dishonored 2,' 'Watch Dogs 2,' and How Not to Screw Up Stealth

Episode Date: November 22, 2016

The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion share their thoughts on stealth games and discuss their impressions of recent high-profile releases ‘Dishonored 2’ (3:25) and ‘Watch Dogs 2’ (16:40). Then, they bring on ‘Firewatch’ and ‘Mark of the Ninja’ designer Nels Anderson to explain ‘Dishonored’ from a developer’s perspective and reveal how his games avoid the potential pitfalls of stealth and narrative exploration games (21:33). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Today's episode of Channel 33 is brought to you by Seekek, the presenting sponsor for my podcast, as well as the only fan-friendly app for buying and selling tickets for sports and music. With just two taps on your phone, you can instantly buy Seekkeek tickets to an event, and you can enter that event just using your phone. No paper tickets. Drop your old ticket app. Use one that's built for 2016.

Download the free Seatgeek app or go to Seekgeek.com. And welcome to Achievement-oriented Channel 33's gaming podcast. My name is Ben Lindberg and I'm a writer for the ringer.com and joined as always by the man who's slinking in the shadows. Jason Concepcion and my colleague at the ringer. Hey, Jason. My sound meter is almost, he's almost ready to alert the cards. Yeah. All right.

Well, we're going to talk about that because this is our stealth episode. We're going to talk a little bit about dishonored two, a little bit about watchdogs too, and just about our general feelings about stealth. And we're also going to talk later in this episode to Nels Anderson, who was a designer on Firewatch and also more relevant to this themed episode, the designer of Mark of the Ninja, which is one of my favorite stealth games ever, Xbox 360 arcade game.

So this is the first of two episodes we are doing on this Thanksgiving week. We'll be back with a second one on Friday, focusing on storytelling. But we're going to get into stealth first. By the way, call back to our first episode. Did you see Battlefield One's Fog of War mode? Have you tried this up? No. What is this?

Is it a new mode? Yeah. So your favorite thing about Battlefield was the fog. I love the fog. So this is a mode with more fog, basically. This is made for you. So you should take a break from Overwatch and dive back into the battlefield. It's like very foggy, so it's close quarters combat.

It's only small arms, so it's just kind of walking around and you can't see anything. No tanks. Suddenly you stab someone. Oh, that's so fantastic. Yeah, that is absolutely my favorite thing about this game is The Fog. So we're going to talk about stealth games, and both of the games that we're going to talk about today are sort of stealthy. They have stealth elements. They're not full-fledged stealth.

And that's good for me because I have never quite caught into stealth games for various reasons. Just don't have patience? I mean, it's a mix of things. So for one thing, I think it's that often the stealth elements are kind of, grafted on, right? Like, it's not a fully fledged stealth engine. It's just, hey, we should have some stealth aspect to the game. Speaking of Battlefield 1, right? Like, there's a stealth level of battlefield, and the enemies have meters over their heads that you can alert. And it's like, come on, it's battlefield. Like, let's not try to force stealth into a shooter that is all about killing things.

So that's part of it. And when a stealth engine isn't done well, I feel like it's one of the more frustrating experiences in video games. If you can't tell, if it feels arbitrary and you're not sure when you're going to be detected and how you're being detected and how you can avoid being detected, that to me is just one of the least enjoyable gaming experiences. Well, you're, you're kind of leading me into speaking about Dishonor 2, a game that I think is fine, but that I was expecting to love. Right. Well, the second reason that I don't really enjoy stealth is that I'm kind of a wimp when I play games. So if the stealth elements are successful, then I'm also unhappy because the feeling that I assume stealth fans are going for,

which is sort of that always on edge, you could be detected at any second. That is just too much for me. I'm a straight forward guy. I live my life on the surface. His hands sweating as Yeah, I will walk in there and I will take on a whole room of bad guys, but I don't want to sneak around them and hide their bodies and turn them to ash so that no one comes across them. I just don't want to do it. I'm too on edge when I'm playing stealth games. So basically, if a stealth game is bad at being a stealth game, I'm not happy. And if it's good at being a stealth game, I'm also not happy. So there's no way a stealth game can win with me, which isn't to say that I don't like it to a certain extent.

and which isn't to say that I haven't liked some stealth games, but I think that's kind of a handicap that is about me and not about the game or the genre. And so that takes us to Dishonor 2. So this game was developed by Arcane Studios. It is, as you may have surmised, the sequel to 2012's Dishonored. It's a first-person stealth action game set in a sort of alternate world 19th century where whale oil is the basis of all the technology.

And it's about investigating and taking down the construction. Spiritors who have deposed the empress of this island empire. I played the first dishonored. You did not. You played the first watchdogs. I did not. So we each have some experience with these franchises. And I think Dishonored 2 is a good game.

I think that what I'm about to say, maybe what we're both about to say, should not necessarily dissuade you from... I feel like we should repeat after everything we say, dishonored is a good game. Right. Yeah. You shouldn't take my experience with the game. as emblematic of your potential experience with the game. But what were your problems with your first exposure to dishonored? Well, first let me say that certain things that I really enjoyed about the game,

which were the main thing is just the creativity with which you can dispatch the various enemies of the world. You can combine various magic spells and sword play, and you can do it in these really almost mathematical ways, mathematical formulas that involve the environment, and things like that. That's super, super cool, and that keeps you going. And I hate to say this as a person who really oftentimes does not care about graphics. But I really found the textures and the kind of look of Dishonored 2 to be kind of like last gen-e. And as you were saying with the mechanics of stealth is naturally slower.

You're spending a lot more time staring at a shadow, at an environment, trying to figure out where on this. map you can safely hang out for, you know, 30 seconds while a guard walks by. And I just found it was like hard to gauge that with dishonored because it was everything kind of looked the samey, you know, textures were very similar. Again, I like this game. There's like maybe two character models for the guards, maybe. And maybe like two voice actors or it might have been just one person. I didn't check the credits, but it might have been just one voice actor doing all the voices. And so it just, you notice those things because, you know, it's stealth and you're spending a lot of time just kind of studying the guards, watching the move, trying to figure out

where you're going. And that just brought me out of the game. But again, it's a fine game. It's good. Yeah, I think part of that for me is that the atmosphere is very oppressive. There's something early in the game. Someone says bad things always seem to happen in Dunwell. It feels like the end of the world. And it, and it does. And that can get kind of heavy after a while. I think it's good that there is a sense of place. It feels like a place, so it's better than just a bland, generic environment. But it's not a place that I enjoy spending time particularly. And you're right about stealth taking more time. And I finished the game and we both played it on console, so we avoided the apparently game-breaking performance issues on PC. The timer had me at 19 hours or something by the time I finished this game. And maybe some of that was walking away and pausing, but a lot of it was. also just trying to take my time, trying to play the game as it's supposed to be played. And the game kind of turned me into a serial quicksaver as I tried to inch my way through the levels and avoid having to replay long sections because the load times alone after deaths were off-puttingly long.

And there's always kind of a moral hazard involved there, especially if you know you have to do a podcast or two podcasts and you have to talk about a few different games and you have to get through them or you have to get a review out or whatever it is and you have to see the game. There's a pressure to keep progressing. Right. And so that can push you more toward one play style that maybe isn't the best for the game. Yeah. And again, it's a fine, it's a fine game. They put a lot of work into it. There's a lot of character building and world building. The combat system is very enjoyable. It's just, I had a lot of people tell me, oh, man, dishonored, like one of the best stealth games ever. That's pushing it.

It's a good game. Yeah, I don't find it to be much improved from the first dishonored. It seems like more of the same, which is what most people wanted. So it delivers in that respect. And yeah, I mean, there are so many boxes and cabinets and things to click on in check. In this game, it's very Bioshock infinite-esque-esque in that way. And I have this compulsion to just click on things and open things because there could be some goody inside. And I had hoped that No Man Sky had cured.

me of that forever because I knew in No Man's Sky, there was no way I could possibly click on everything. So I stopped clicking on things. But no, it's back. And for some reason, you can extinguish every candle and you can type on every typewriter. And there's no real reason to do those things. I guess it's just supposed to make the world more immersive. Yeah, the typewriter confused me. You encounter a typewriter very early in the game. Yes. And I was like, what? Yeah, I just don't, I didn't understand it. And I. And, And I think the story, there are some good aspects to the story, but it's sort of, because the world is so bleak, there's nothing really to root for. You're trying to restore someone to the throne.

And there's no evidence that she did a good job when she was on the throne. Like everywhere you go in the world of dishonored, there are dead bodies just in buildings everywhere, just lying around. And in the first dishonored, which is set 15 years earlier, there's a plague. so it's at least explained why they're dead people everywhere and rats everywhere. And in this game, nothing seems to have improved. So whoever is running Carnaca or Dunwall is not doing a good job. It seems like they deserve to have a coup or at least a new sanitation department. And so I'm not all that motivated to restore them to the throne.

Did you play as Corvo, the character from the first game or Emily? I played as Emily. It just seemed more interesting at the time. Yeah, definitely seemed more interesting. I played as Corvo just basically because I was worried that Emily would be more stealth oriented and that I would like it even less. So I played as Corvo who just kind of has one of these gruff video game voices and Emily has some unique powers and also maybe a more interesting narrative. But you get this choice to choose between them early in the game and there's no indication of which one you should choose, which I found semi-frustrating. I guess it's just incentive to play the game a second time.

and this is probably a game that would benefit from a second play-through, but I would have liked a little bit of guidance there about how my experience would be different, depending on the choice I made. But, I mean, we've been very negative here, and I will echo the compliment you paid early on, which is that, you know, this game has a DeiSX lineage, and the original DeiSX is one of our favorite games.

And so there are elements that carry over, and there are many ways you can go about beating a level, There are some very creatively designed levels. There's a kind of clockwork mansion populated by clockwork soldiers, and the entire building rearranges itself and folds and unfolds itself as you pull levers. I think part of the reason I don't love this game is that I'm just bad at it. Like, I think I'm just bad at this game, and I beat it, I finished it, but I felt like I was not using the combat system to its greatest advantage.

I often felt like I was not exploring enough or on my way, out of a level I would see somewhere I should have gone and wished I would have gone and just didn't see it the first time through. So some of this just may be my own weakness. And it didn't help my gaming wimpiness that everywhere you go is like a deserted mansion with witches and scary creatures. And it's a very anxiety-inducing game for me. I also felt that it kind of pushes you toward the stealth side of the spectrum.

Like in the tutorial, it says why fight when you can slip past? and my answer to that is usually that fighting is more fun, or at least it is for me. Like, there are those badass moments where you sneak past everyone and you feel good about not having to shed any blood. But for me, I kind of like the carnage. And I guess the escapist fantasy that I'm trying to indulge when I play video games is not sneaking around, but the freedom from having to sneak around. I felt like this game, when you did get detected and when everything went to hell, it was not as, fun for me as a game that is sort of a dedicated combat game, although there were ways you could experiment. I didn't find the combat as satisfying as, say, Bioshock, for instance. Yeah, I think part of that

for me is that I have yet to play a game where you are armed with a sword in the first person that feels satisfying. Yes, that's a good point. Whenever, it just feels like whenever you end up swinging that thing, the camera goes every which way, and now I'm staring at a wall. I don't even know where the guy I was fighting is. And it's just, no one has ever got that right. I'm not sure it's possible also. And so, you know, that really hampered. That's kind of like a soft barrier to fighting it out and dishonored.

You know, it's just, you know, you're not going to fight two or three people with a sword and a gun in dishonored because as soon as you swing that thing, you're just staring at something that you're not supposed to be looking at. It's tough. Yeah. I think we need VR to deliver the first satisfying sword fighting. game probably. So yeah, you can choose your character and you can choose your play style high chaos or low chaos. And I'm just physically incapable of playing low chaos. It seems like even when

I tried. So I killed lots of people along the way, even though I tried not to when I could avoid it, probably not the ideal way to play dishonored. But again, dishonored is good. It's good. It's fine. Everyone else you will read and listen to like Dishonored just more than we did, I think. So be aware of that it does a lot of things really well. And for whatever reason, it just didn't connect to us fully. What are your stealth games of choice? All time, let's see. I'm like you and I'm not necessarily a stealth guy. The ones that I like offer a good balance between stealth and you blew it. It's time to kill everyone. The first stealth game that I really, really liked was probably Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, which was an Xbox game.

that had one of the more interesting multiplayer mechanics that I've seen. It was three-on-three multiplayer. It might have been three-on-two. And so you can play either as a spy, the stealth spy, or as like this very heavily armed security guard who's protecting a facility. And the spies could move through the ducts, and you couldn't see them in the shadows, and they had various, like, UV vision and heat vision.

And they could set these, you know, very kind of tricksy spy traps to electrocute the guards and things like that, whereas the guards could just straight up, you know, lob grenades into aerodox. And it was this balancing act between, you know, heavily armed and kind of not that mobile, very groundbound, and this kind of quicksilver cat-like thing. And it was really fun, really fun game.

After that, you know, I've played a lot of Metal Gear, which is one of the strangest, like, big titles ever. You know, Metal Gear, it's like would take you basically five days to explain with the plot of the entire series is, but that's also a game that has a good balance between playing completely stealthy, never killing anybody, never being seen, or you're seen, and now it's just time to shoot everyone. Hitman, the Hitman game for PS2 was also one that I enjoyed. Those are my big ones.

Yeah, and just a few words on Watchdogs. This is the sequel to the original Watchdogs, which came out in 2014. Both games were developed and published by Ubisoft, and so, like a lot of Ubisoft, and so, like, a lot of Microsoft games, it's an open world action adventure with some stealth aspects and a very packed map with a ton of activities. The focus here is on hacking. You're inducted into a hacker collective immediately after the prologue. You haven't had a chance to try it yet. I haven't finished it, but I've spent several hours with it. And I went right from Dishonored to Watchdogs. And it really is a dramatic change of tone, not only from dishonored, but also from what I understand from watchdogs.

The original watchdogs, which you played was it took itself very seriously, right? Yes. It was a very serious type of game. It was a good game. It was strangely, the best things about that game were the combat was, you know, the main character, Aidan was great with gunplay, is very skilled martial artist. The third person shooting mechanics, it was basically a cover shooter that was very well executed. And then the hacking just kind of felt grafted on. You know, it's like use your phone and you open a door and like, you know, it's felt very ad hoc.

How is this one feel? So far, very good. I'm really enjoying it. It has this very laid back kind of playful vibe, not all the way to the Saints Row over the top end of the spectrum. But it's funny. It's attempting to be funny. At least sometimes it succeeds at that. So you're playing in a real life San Francisco and you have a.

a pretty extensive array of powers. And so it's still a hacking game, but there is a lot to it. And it sort of shares Mr. Robots' disdain for bad hacking shows and games, it seems like, although it probably also commits a lot of those tropes that Mr. Robot puts down. But story-wise, it's good. There's a very diverse cast of characters and good characters so far. The protagonist is African-American, and which was also. the case in Mafia 3 and hopefully will be a bit of a trend, although it's still underrepresented

in gaming probably, but he's just a really good character, good likable character. And there's a lot of stealth. There's still a lot of sneaking around, but I feel much more in control of my character and my environment than I do in most stealth games. There's sort of a GTA-style RC car and a quadcopter and you can operate them remotely and take control. of them individually and switch between them during missions and you can control cameras so you can look around and identify the enemy. So you get a much better sense of your surroundings than you do in a lot of stealth games. So I did not get my stealth anxiety popping up again. So I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far. It seems like a big improvement over the first game. One of the things I

didn't like about the first game was that the main character, Aidan, was just kind of like a blank. the game asked a lot of kind of really interesting questions about the morality of hacking while also giving you, like putting you in control of this guy who like stole people's credit cards to pay for his various, his various exploits, you know? Like, so how does watchdogs to compare? Yeah, that is still kind of a problem. I mean, your main goal is to take down this nefarious company that is using all manner of devices.

is it's sort of a prescient storyline in that it's talking about just all of the always on internet connected internet of things devices that recently have led to real life problems. So the goal is sort of to take down or expose all this information that's being captured. And so that's the larger goal. And you have to keep performing missions to gain a certain amount of followers who then download your app and give you more processing power. so you can take on even more ambitious missions. So it's sort of a Silicon Valley send up in a sense also. And so, yeah, you are sort of these righteous hackers who are trying to take down this nefarious company.

And yet I am constantly stealing money from passersby. So there is that kind of dissonance of being a good guy mostly, but then being pretty bad all the time and, you know, like hijacking cars and stealing stuff. And, I mean, it's a video game. So it's hard to have that kind of coherent narrative and also make a fun game. So it has that same sort of compromise, unless that's some kind of commentary on how having access to people's information corrupts even hackers with the best intentions, but probably not. So all of the slight reservations that I or we have expressed about stealth games in general do not apply to a game that was designed by our guest.

We're bringing on Nels Anderson, and he worked on Firewatch, and he also worked on Mark of the Ninja, which is just a fantastic game. And I say that as someone who goes into stealth games already prepared not to like it because I am worried from my past history that I won't. And yet, Mark of the Ninja is just one of my favorite games, period, let alone stealth games. So, Nels, thanks for coming on. What? Well, you're grease in the slate like that. I mean, why would I not? Why would I not?

No, no, no. It is very kind of you guys to invite me on to its chat about things. Yeah, so we'll get into the greatness that you have created personally in just a second. But before we do, you happen to be playing dishonored yourself. And so we will give you the floor for a minute to talk about not to speak for the other side. I wouldn't say that we are against dishonored, but we are not quite as complimentary as the consensus. And when we told you that, just before we started recording, you were aghast. Shocked.

Shock. You like dishonored a lot. Tell us what you like about it and both, I guess, as a gamer and as someone who maybe looks at it with a professional eye, as someone who's designed a stealth game. Yeah. I mean, my love of games of this ilk can be like, I like most entries in the genre, but for me, it's easy to point to one very specific spot, and that spot is Thief, the Dark Project from Looking Glass.

It came out back in 98. I maintain it still holds up. You just have to get used to the early era polygon graphics where a dude is like 20 triangles. Weird little pointing feet. Same voice actor as Corvo, right? I know. Stephen Russell. He's still doing it.

It's awesome. He was also the head of the Thieves Guild. In Skyrim. Uh-huh. Okay. So he's kind of a podcast. My favorite guild. My favorite guild in Skyrim.

Yeah. Yeah. So the thing that struck me when I played thief, you know, being younger at the time was it was like, and this was especially novel back then. It's, I think it's still actually very uncommon now where, you know, the world existed outside of just like this little tiny bubble of agency around a player, right? Because like, I mean, this is probably more of a form following function thing, or the other way around, I guess.

because like, you know, the premise of the game is the other characters in the world don't know where you are. Like almost by definition, that means that they have to be able to do all their own stuff, right? So the game itself is like this, no pun intended, clockwork machine. Maybe that was actually like a week. I didn't even put that together until right now. But like the game is, you know, it's this clockwork mechanism, right, where all these gears and systems are all clicking and whirring and twisting, completely separate of your direct intervention and it's your job to kind of like, you know, be deliberate and observe how these things all fit together. And then you're going to take that

moment to kind of like poke and prod and then try to change the machine and make it do what you want, right? That's very different from almost all like other avatar-based action adventure type games where, you know, those games are all about reacting, right? Like, you walk into some new area, like you cross over some trigger volume, the game spawns some dudes, they know where you are, they're going to come and blast you, and then you have to deal with them. That's fine. Like, you know, a game that's all about reactive and dealing with the moment-to-momentness,

like that can be great. Like, you know, there's a lot of interesting beauty to be had in games like that. But what exists kind of on the other side of the field is a far less explored territory, Which is why that I've always found stealth games to be so interesting is because they're very player-centric and kind of just the way you approach them is way more intentional, right? It's almost like the way you play a strategy game. We're like, all right, well, I want the Z outcome. So then I got to do X and Y to get there, which is very different. Just like, stay alive or get into that platform from this one or whatever.

That's more my speed. And that's fine. I mean, again, it's not like a thing that's inherently, it's not a good or bad, right? It's just, it's just flavors of a thing. It's just exploring different types of ideas and different ways that, you know, the player can engage with the world. And I think that maybe more than any other series, I mean, not surprising, given the creators and their influences, that Dishonored, like, carries that, quote, unquote, immersive sim torch into, you know, contemporary games, probably more than any other, right? Like those are like it is a game again I haven't played a ton just on her too but I mean it it is like I I am so completely already sold like from minute one that it would have to be a very dramatic departure from what it wanted to be for it not just to like be my catnip right I'm just like oh yes give me more that weird weird kind of pseudo-victorian uh I'll get you there's a weird

I have weird powers. Ah, give it to me. But, like, it's still, like, all the things that make that type of game. And again, if it's not your flavor, that's fine. But if it is your flavor, like, all that stuff is there, right? Like, you have so many different approaches in these really, like, intricate, thorough, like, robust systems where you're like, you know, I mean, I can't imagine if I did this and then this. There's no way the game could possibly handle.

And then, of course, it does. You're like, oh, all right, of course, if I domino this guy over to that guy and then do this other thing. Oh, of course that works. I never imagined that it would, but it did. And so that is the stuff that I love. And the other kind of unique thing about this type of game, again, as like an avatar-based game, is because the way you move through the space is, again, is if you do it right, not right, but you have the option to do it in a way that, like, the actual, you know, the agents in the game that can respond. you are completely ignorant of your presence, that the space itself has to be built in a far more like organic and tangible way. Like if you look at the maps for most video game levels, they are just

incoherent, like insane. That's, that's not a real place. That's absurd. But, you know, if you like, if the game is built well, you totally don't see the walls of that Potemkin village, right? But it absolutely is. But with, you know, kind of, kind of 3D or even 2D sort of, but they're fundamentally more abstract. Right. So with like a 3D self game, you know, the space has to be a lot more organic. And then it just gives you the sense of being in a real place in a way that a lot of, you know, first person actiony games don't. So that's the thing that I always really appreciate where, you know, I mean, it's kind of why narrative exploration games are also interesting, right?

It's like, oh, you're actually in this actual place with all these weird details and you can really get up. close and like take a look at them and just kind of take your time and marinate in this weird different space and i also love that very much and honored also delivers that in spades so yeah like i said i was already sold on it from the outset but it does have those qualities that are like i maintain are still relatively unique among games um especially like big big budget like action adventure or avatar-driven games. And so, yeah, I like it. Well, I was hoping that your clockwork reference was to Sly Cooper,

which is more of my stealth background. That's a stealth series I can get behind. Actually, Dishonored sort of has Sly Cooper style comic-y animations before each level begins. But when you're playing a game like Dishonard or something in this genre, to what extent are you playing it like Jason and I would, like anyone would, and to what extent are you looking at it with this? experienced I, like, oh, how did they do that? I should figure out how to do that.

Maybe that's something I could incorporate in the future, like, from a technical perspective, just admiring a competitor's work. I mean, it's interesting just because the scale that games of that size operate on is so different than anything I've worked on in the past. Like a lot of the immediate stuff is like, man, this environment is humongous and robust and has all this detail. it's like, oh, that's because they probably had like 20 environment artists working on it or whatever, right? So that, like, a lot of the actual, the stuff that you've directly come in contact with playing the game is, like, a lot of that is just by virtue of having a lot of resources to make a thing that's really big.

But there is, you know, some of the ways that, like, the various, you know, different stealth systems feedback on top of each other. Or, like, given that I've never worked on a 3D self game, um, obviously I played a lot of them and enjoyed a lot of them, but it does have a very different set of problems to solve than we were trying to solve with Ninja. It's always interesting to kind of compare. It's like, okay, well, the thing that we were, the way we were able to solve this because we are a fundamentally more abstract, like, side-scrolling 2D thing, the solutions we had just don't transfer into the third dimension at all, right?

So it's kind of like, okay, well, how are they approaching this? Ah, that's really interesting. would I do that? I'm not sure, but I also don't know if there's other ways to do it. It gives me a lot to think about, even if it's a lot of things that I probably will never act on, because I don't think I'll ever work on a game that large. That's interesting what you said about kind of like the obstacles of making a 2D game versus a 3D stealth game. I suppose those probably seem like really obvious to, but what were some of those things that like came up in the development of Mark of the Ninja that if, If you tried to port that solution over to a 3D game, it just wouldn't work.

Yeah, well, with Ninja, we, and it wasn't like the outcomes of this weren't super explicit from the outset, but I think it was a nice semi-unintended consequence where a lot of folks who said, oh, I never really like stealth games, but I really like Ninja. And I think part of what contributed to that is with, even though I love them to death, I get why some people might kind of, collide with and then bounce off the surface of stealth games is because a lot of them are just so much, especially the big, complicated 3D ones, are so much about trial and error, right? Like, you have to figure out, oh, okay, well, how does the guards' behavior and perception model actually work? And a lot of that is just you try it and you either kind of soft fail where they'll come over to investigate or you actually fail and they spot you. And you just kind of have to get ground through not doing well.

on that a handful of times until you start to internalize more of those behaviors and rules. You know, like old, old thief kind of addressed that by it's like, we'll just slap a light gem on your HUD. And if it's black, the guys probably won't see you. And if it's white, they probably will. But even then that doesn't communicate that much. That doesn't communicate everything, right? Because it's not like the enemies have infinite sight lines or the direction they're facing matters, right? They don't have perfect like 180 semicircle vision. So there's all kinds of, just because so much is simulated in a 3D space, there's just way, way, way more that the player has to understand and internalize

that when you get rid of a dimension, when you have one less T. Then I can play it. Yeah, it is like we not only have the operative. And because it's kind of like presentationally, it's just more abstract anyway, right? like a little 2D guy jumping on platforms. Like, what does that even mean in three? It doesn't mean. It's abstracted.

So we could get away with being way more explicit with how a lot of those stealth systems, right? So when Ninja, you know, when you make a noise, like there's just actually a friggin ring that appeared off screen that says, this is how far the noise went. If it overlapped with that guy's ears, he heard it. If it did not, he did not. And similarly, we made the guards whenever they had a flashlight. That was almost like 95% the same as their vision cone. So because we were just able to just like slap on the screen what the player normally needed to just internalize by a lot of trial and error experimentation,

I think it was a lot more readable for people, and thus they were kind of able to get to the reason why Stalking interesting is that very intentional play that's really systemic and player focus, and you're thinking, like I said, like three moves ahead and all that, you can just, it's just like kind of an express lane into that mindset.

In a way that, like, you just, I don't know what that, I don't even know where it'd start, like trying to figure out what that looked like in 3D. Like, every guard has this big, weird, like, projected triangle out in front of their face, but even you can't even really perceive that in 3D super well, like, you know, you kind of have that dark vision power in dishonor where you can turn it on. And that can be useful if you need like a really specific bit of information for just one

second. But you obviously couldn't just have that going on all the time because it would be unreadable and completely insane. So it's just like that challenge of explicitness. I just don't really know how you solve it. I mean, the way they kind of address it in dishonored, and I think this is actually really, really smart, right, is that they play with verticality a lot. Right. Yeah. You know, in general, like, the space that the guards control is usually, you know, on the ground or on the floor, right? But because you've got, you know, your crazy jumping abilities and the blink and Emily's far reach that you can just get above that sort of plane that they control. And that's kind of like, that's your equivalent of being in the shadows, right?

where you're like, okay, well, I'm up here. I'm raised above unless I do something that makes that butthole look up at me. I know I'm basically concealed. And so then you can kind of survey the battlefield and all that. But that's not every. You can't just like walk on the metaphorical crenellations of the walls for the entire level. So that's where things can, again, just get more challenging. We're like, okay, well, now I'm in this hallways.

Now I have to use like the actual architecture to break up these sightlines. But oh, crap, there was a guy who just came around. that corner there. I couldn't know that he was there. Stuff like that. It's not, it's not bad. I just get why it's a bit more challenging for someone to just dive into that pool because you do got to do a lot more work to figure out what the hell is going on. Yeah, you're describing my experience with Mark of the Ninja perfectly, which, you know, maybe some stealth purists would feel that their hand was being held to, to great an extent, or they were being deprived of the true test of stealth, in that there were these on-screen indicators that kind of helped you through it to an extent.

For me, it didn't deprive me of any of the enjoyment that I get from stealth games, which is, you know, sneaking around and feeling like a badass. But I was just, I felt in complete control of the environment and I knew what the parameters were and I knew how the world worked and I could kind of play within that framework and still have a challenge, but feel like it was a very fair challenge and that I knew what it was. Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't think, I don't recall really ever hearing for someone who's like, I like stealth games, but I, Ninja gives me too much information. I think it's way too easy. Because it's like that whole, you know, trial and error internalizing the game system. It's like, that's not actually the fun part, right? Like, that's not even the people who are really into stealth games. That's not the part you like. The part that, the satisfying bit is when you can act on that information to, you know, to manipulate the enemies in getting them to do what you want them to do.

Like, that's the goodness. That's the satisfying part. So the fact that you can just get to it a lot faster and easier a ninja, I don't think that really was off putting to anyone. I don't recall ever hearing that from anybody. I was talking to Tom Bissell recently, and he was saying that one of the things that he's kind of come to realize, as he's done more writing for games, is how much of the kind of, like, writerly problem solving is just very ancient stuff. You know, like in Shakespeare, you'd have this thing where the fool would come out and do a five minutes. soliloquy and there's absolutely no reason

narratively for that thing to be there except for the cast needs to change clothes and things like that. And Firewatch does a lot of these does this, a lot of this like mechanical trickery, ways to get the player to play the story when the player can

interact with anything he or she wants to. Could you talk about some of those problems and how you end up solving them? Oh my God. Those problems were infinite. it. Yeah, that was the weird thing about making Firewatch where, you know, the first person narrative exploration game, like most of those games take place in what I'd call like the past tense, right, where, you know, this is typified by gone home, but also everybody's gone to the rapture

or Vanishing of Ethan Carter or whatever else where it's like, okay, you show up at some place and then you are now like half detective, half archaeologist, where your job is to like dig through and interrogate this space and basically figure out what happened here and where all the people went. And that's fine. That's cool. That's awesome. But because basically all the events, like all the plot that is there,

that's already all transpired, right? It's all done. That means that you kind of don't actually have to care what the player does really. Like, you know, if they spend four hours, just like tossing crap around the living room. It doesn't matter, right? But obviously

Firewatch is not that. Like the story we wanted to tell with Firewatch was very much active. You were in this particular place for the span of time. Like this game is about this guy's really weird summer. But that meant that, you know, a lot of the stuff you normally do

in like a first person narrative exploration game, it just wasn't an option for us, right? So it's kind of like even just really simple mundane stuff where it's, you know, how do you have like an interesting bit of, I hate the word content, but like some optional bit of the game, like a little side B plot thing that the player may explore, may discover, but they're not forced to, right? Okay, it's like, well, you know, our game doesn't have any firewatch system, have any big heavy mechanical systems, so we're not going to put like a missile pack or some high jump boots there or whatever. So it's like, oh, what's going to be there? And probably some stuff you're going to talk about with Delilah. But the thing is, is the when you find that stuff in like the actual, you know, in fictional time of the game, like if you find that stuff on day two when you and Delilah are just kind of paling around and getting to know each other and whatever, then it's like, okay, you just kind of have like a jocular kind of jokey conversation about it and it's fine.

But if you were to find that same thing on day 79, when everything has just gone completely insane, then everything could be different. And so you just multiply that out by like the million different contexts the game could be in at any particular point. And then it becomes really challenging just to, like, even put a little tiny, small bit of, like, optional story into the game. And then...

Even for all, like, the main story stuff, right? We didn't want to do kind of the old, you know, like classic LucasArts Sierra Adventure Game thing where you're gated by all these really, like, very strict, like, item type puzzles or, you know, If the player does something that's not expected yet, like the character just monologues to themselves, ooh, I don't want to go through that door now or whatever. There's actually technically one tiny,

microscopic moment in Firewatch where we had to do something like that, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone comment about it, which means hopefully no one has ever found it or experienced it, and we did our job. But because we, and that was literally that was only because we, could not find a better way to not have the game just explode and be insane if the player did a very specific thing at a very specific time. But generally, you know, we are constantly wrestling with the, okay, well, kind of, you know, through Delilah or other stuff that's going on in the plot, probably the player is going to go over here to this area now and do this stuff. But what if they don't?

Like, what if they just walk over to a complete opposite direction? Like, the game shouldn't just be empty and hollow, right? it still should kind of do something. So we were constantly wrestling with like, okay, well, how do we direct the player toward kind of the next big chunk of the game without literally just funneling them for A to B to C? And sometimes, like, our only option was just,

well, we'll just have to support it no matter what they do. So there's this bit on, this isn't like a big spoiler or anything, but there's this one bit where for reasons the player is kind of encouraged to go get a, a new walkie-talkie that's different than the one they get right when they show up in the tower. But the thing is, even though the game is kind of like heavily leading you toward that, there's nothing actually stopping you from just being like, nah, screw that, I'm just going to go do this completely different thing.

And so you can play like a good 20, 30-minute chunk of the game where either of those two possibilities, which dramatically change kind of the narrative context the game is operating in, we know which of those you're in, but we just have to support both of them because we can't guarantee that you went and got that walkie-talkie. We couldn't come up with any way to absolutely positively

force the player to go get that new walkie-talkie without it just like completely shattering the fourth wall and just being terrible. So there's that huge like big chunk of the game. Well, there's just like two versions of every single line and all this like horrible logic to figure out okay, well if you did this thing and then you did that thing like you went to the place you were going to go

without the radio. But then Delilah was kind of kind of mad at you, so then you went back and you did get the replacement, and then you came back again. It's, there's just so much stuff in the game like that that's just crazy. When you have a space that is like, so you don't have any levels, right? Like, you know, in a lot of games, they get around this problem, but it's like, oh, when you go into the next level, you just can't ever go back. So the possibility space of where you could be at any particular time is way more compartmentalized. But for Firewatch, it's just kind of like the player got the thing that they need to get into this new area. So they're just going to do that whenever they want after this point, I guess.

And there's this big bit kind of similarly near the end of the game, which I won't get into for spoiler reasons or whatever, where it's like there's a pretty massive like chunk of like tying up the game plot stuff that you could just be like, I don't care. I'm just going to go the other way and finish the game now. And the game is like it has to support that because the alternative. I mean, we could do some very like hamphicid, ugly thing to technically make it work. But it would just be, it would just be bad.

So rather than have, you know, like some weird small percentage of the game just be terrible for a number of players who either intentionally or unintentionally like end up going that way, we have to be like, okay, well, we're just going to have to make it work no matter what the player does. So like all the most just twisted contortions that we had to go through, like all the worst problem solving in Firewatch was definitely just stuff about like, okay, well, the player should probably go do X. But what if they don't? It sounds like as a designer, you would start to hate other human beings at a certain point. Don't do the. Why are you going there? Pick up the walkie-talkie. Yeah, basically. I mean, like, again, it's not fortunately because, you know, Firewatch doesn't have that much mechanical stuff.

Like, you know, it wasn't, like, often the problems. I shouldn't say they were easy to solve, but they were like, once we figure them out, there was usually, we could without too much horrible labor, eventually figure it out one way or the other. But the challenge was often just like figuring out all those weird, like gaps where we hadn't thought about like, oh yeah, well, what if the player does do blah, right? Because like, you know, we kind of have the normal play through the game in our heads with like, okay, well, you know, probably players are going to do this, but maybe they could do that. And then we just kind of forget that like, oh, but the people playing the game don't know that. they don't know like what the appropriate next thing is. And if they completely wander off the beaten path or whatever,

okay, well, right. Of course, why didn't we think of that? Ah, now we got to deal with that. That was a frustratingly reoccurring theme. What is, you know, you talk to comedians a lot of times, and they'll talk about like things that are hack, which are like unimaginative stuff. What is, give me like the most hackiest way to gate a player from going into an area

or doing something to get him to do him or her to do what you want. I mean, because games are software, right? Like, you can just literally enforce it where, you know, until you either click on this thing or move your avatar through this space, you know, we're just going to keep you locked in this place. But especially when you're making a game that is grounded in the real world, right? Like, Firewatch is set in a real place in good old Wyoming and ICE 89. like, you know, we don't have the sci-fi fantasy trappings

that games often do, right? Like, you can't be, you know, there's a bit where it's like, oh, there was this weird locked gate. Right. And then you found this key. I guess you're going there now. So it's the kind of thing where it's like, like, that's the kind of stuff that you can,

I think we got away with it because we only did it once. Right. really in Firewatch. If there were like three or four mysterious keys out in this wilderness, we'd be making a pretty stupid game. So it's often,

it's often like, right? Like, it's one part, you know, like how hacky something like that is or isn't is like, like how how much does it break the fourth wall? And then how often are you going back to that same well, right? Like if you can get, you know, if you can get

clever about it or deploy some smoke and mirrors or whatever, then often people won't even notice. And I think this is sometimes actually even to our detriment on Firewatch, where like because kind of the main plot vis-a-vis, especially what Delilah was telling you over the radio, just kind of kept you moving forward from A to B to C, that I think sometimes for some players,

the game felt like more linear than we were intending. Like there were definitely bits where, you know, in our heads were like, oh, okay, well, this will be the bit where probably people like kind of slow down, take a bit to like explore and check out what in the environment, what's going on, what's all this stuff around them. But often they folks, again, it's not universal in any way, but probably slightly more than we were expected. People are just kind of like beeline to the next thing, to the next thing to the next thing, which is again, which is fine. It wasn't like it was bad, but it was just one of those things where it's like, again, because we kind of knew all this stuff that was going on behind the scenes and we knew what, what, was and wasn't like priority, if you know what I mean, that it was difficult to kind of maybe recognize that there were some bits where the game was like, maybe it was pushing you from

behind just a little bit more than we were thinking it was. All right. Well, I hope that you make more games because your games are good. I like your games. I think you. I keep making games. I also hope to make video games or I'm going to have some real trouble paying my rent. All right.

Right. Well, everyone who has not played Firewatch and Mark of the Ninja yet, if you can track down a copy of Mark of the Ninja, you definitely should, even if you have to go buy an Xbox 360 to do it. Or it's still on Steam? It's on PC, right, yeah, so you can play it on Steam. And you should, and you can follow Nels on Twitter at Nels or Mench, and we eagerly await your next project. So thanks for explaining stealth to me. Nice pleasure, guys. Thanks so much for chatting. All right. Good talking to you. All right, so that brings this episode to its end,

and we will have another episode later this very week that you can listen to while you're traveling over Thanksgiving weekend should be up Friday. We'll talk more about Firewatch, and we'll also talk about Telltale and their new Batman game. So, Jason, thanks again. Thank you. And thanks everyone for sticking with us so far

and saying nice things and subscribe to Channel 33 and let everyone know that you like the show. Bye.