Freedom Through Stealth

Cover Story: Once seen as a joyless burden, stealth-driven gameplay now offers gaming’s most liberating design.

wo things caught my attention as the 1UP staff completed its Best of E3 2012 voting. First, the music genre put in an awfully good showing for a genre that’s supposedly dead; nearly half our winners featured games with a musical theme. Secondly, the “Player Agency” category — the games that seem to give their players the greatest degree of freedom to complete their appointed tasks — hail almost entirely from the stealth action niche.

There’s a curious irony to this fact. Since the concept of stealth in games really took off, which happened around 1998 with the release of Metal Gear Solid, gamers have increasingly viewed the addition of stealth as a cumbersome, intrusive play mechanic. Even two of the defining pillars of stealth, Splinter Cell and Metal Gear itself, have more or less abandoned the concept of silent infiltration with the games on display at E3: Sam Fisher speed-squatted his way through the Splinter Cell: Blacklist demo, killing multiple simultaneous targets as he dashed through the glare of the desert sun, while Solid Snake has been removed completely from the picture in favor hyperkinetic ninja action in Metal Gear Rising.