作者：Timothee Garnaud

潜行是一种小众电子游戏类型。虽然有越来越多游戏包含潜行元素/方式，如最近的《骇客入侵：人类革命》或《蝙蝠侠：阿卡姆疯人院》，但实际上却不再具有完整的潜行游戏。

我们可以说潜行被划分成3个重要步骤：

第一步：观察：了解环境，敌人，他们的路径，隐匿处等等。

第二步：做计划：现在你熟悉了环境，可以开始思考做什么，要杀死谁，基于什么顺序等等。

第三步：执行计划：现在你便可以开始行动。按照你所计划的行动，可能有效，也有可能失效。

作为这类型游戏的忠实粉丝，我玩过许多潜行游戏，从1997年的第一款《天诛》到今天的《骇客入侵：人类革命》。在任何潜行游戏中，不管好坏，都仍带有一些问题。所以我决定在此列出那些常见的问题。

1.“容易抗击”的问题：

潜行游戏旨在避免与敌人的正面对抗。当你不被发现地穿越一间房间时（不管你是打败了NPC还是简单地穿越），你将获得满足感。当你想到一个能够有效执行（第三步）的完美计划（第二步）时，你将获得最大的满足感。这是对于你的想法的奖励，这在某种程度上与益智游戏相似：你发现解决问题的一个合适的答案。

如果你被发现了，这便意味着你还未找到一个正确的解决方法，或者你的计划并不能有效运行。所以游戏将惩罚你，如果你不能快速隐藏起来的话，你便会死去。

如果对于玩家来说直接对抗变得太过轻松，那么他们的满足感便会下降，因为玩家会想“如果我可以前进并杀死对手的话，我又有何思考的必要呢？”这并不包括能够挑战自己的硬核玩家；或者如果你是在设计一款跨越不同类型的游戏的话，也不需要思考这一问题。

2.“我的同伴死了？无所谓”的问题：

（在我看来这是最愚蠢且最常见的问题）

因为你不能直接将子弹对准敌人的脸，如此的话潜行会变得过于现实。不是基于背景或者你的能力，而是基于你的角色的弱点。这是关于沉浸感的一个重要部分。但每当我们看到如下情况时这种现实感便会崩溃：当你杀死/击败一个NPC，他的身体将出现在其他NPC，从而会触发警报。所以你会为了避免被杀死而隐藏起来。在花了一些时间后，通常是1至2分钟，这种警报将停止，一些守卫会回到他们的HQ，其他人也会继续巡逻。

我的意思是，“过来伙计，你知道我在这里，我将杀死你。你们中的一个已经被击倒了，你会感到焦虑吗？”在游戏中的1分钟内，所有的沉浸感便会消失。在《天诛》系列中，到目前为止你可以在守卫寻找入侵者的时候模仿狗吠，同时警报将快速停止。

我同意如果总是出现2倍多的守卫，并且他们不断地追寻你的踪迹的话，某些玩家会觉得游戏太困难了。但实际上你的计划失败也需要带有结果，不管是玩家拥有更多难题还是他将加载并重新进入房间。如果不这么做的话你便会破坏沉浸感和满足感。

3.“明显的内容改变路径”的问题

就像之前所说的，潜行的一大部分便是思考。思考正确的路径，将击败多少NPC，先消灭哪个NPC等等。这与《传送门》等益智游戏中的推理类似。你必须思考该做出怎样的移动，基于何种顺序，它将对剩下的内容造成怎样的影响。

但如果益智游戏适合“一个问题–一个解决方法”，那么它在潜行方面便具有差别性。“如何通过房间”的问题将会基于你所选择的方式不断发生改变。这取决于玩家所选择的方法。玩家类型是否会尝试着杀死房间中的所有NPC？或者他只是尝试着偷偷前行而不进行任何的打斗？潜行将提供给玩家许多可能性。

dxhr_adamcover(from gamasutra)

如今这一问题很少会出现在完整的潜行游戏中，但却频繁地出现在那些尝试着添加较小的潜行序列的游戏。以下是一些较典型的例子：

有一个走廊，并有两个看守门卫。如果你向前走，你将会，不，你应该会被发现。你的右边有一个通风井，如果钻进里面的话你就不会被发现了。所以现在你要爬到里面去。如此你便可以使用潜行机制并避免与敌人进行对抗了。

你会发现玩家可能不会去思考该怎么做，或者不会计划任何内容，他只会走那条不会让自己的角色死掉的唯一路径。这里不存在第一步，第二步或第三步。这里只有唯一的路径，即隐藏在可能导致角色死亡的某一效果中。

以上都是你在设计一款潜行游戏时需要避免的一些主要问题。很遗憾的是这是电子游戏中较不常见的游戏类型之一。但同时这也是能够取得较大发展的游戏之一。在今天，多亏了跨类型游戏（游戏邦注：允许使用不同的方法—-始于2007年的第一款《刺客信条》），这一类型的游戏变得越来越受欢迎。也许在几年内，我们便能看到大量潜行游戏的袭来。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

How NOT to make a good Stealth Game

by Timothee Garnaud

Infiltration is a minority genre in video games. Yet more and more games include infiltration components / way of playing the game, like recently Deus Ex: Human revolution, or Batman: Arkham Asylum. But there are praticly no longer full games of infiltration.

We could say that infiltration is divided in 3 important steps:

Step 1: Observation: Knowing the environment, the ennemies, their paths, the hideouts…

Step 2:Plan-etablishing: Now that you know the place, thinking of what to do, who to kill, in what order, etc…

Step 3: Plan execution: Now it is time for action. Acting as you planed, and it may work… or not.

As a big fan of the genre, I’ve come to play a large amont of infiltration franchises, from the first Tenchu in 1997, to today’s Deus Ex: Human revolution. In everyone of those, good or bad game, there are mistakes that still persist. So I decided to list the most commons.

1. The “Easy-fighting” mistake:

The purpose of infiltration game is to avoid front confrontation with ennemies. Satisfaction comes when you pass through a room without being spotted, whether you knocked down NPCs or simply passed through. Full satisfaction is gained when you though of a right plan (Step 2) that perfectly worked (in Step 3). It is a reward for your mind, somehow similar to a puzzle game: you discovered one right answer to solve the problem (current room).

If you get spotted, that means either you haven’t found a right solution, or somehow your plan did’nt work so well. So the game punishes you, and if you don’t hide quickly and well, you may get killed.

If direct confrontation becomes too easy for the player, the satisfaction will sensibly decrease, because the player will think “What’s the point of thinking so much if I can just go and kill”. Exept for hardcore-gamers who challenge themselves. And if you are designing a cross-genre game.

2. The “My buddy’s dead? Nevermind” mistake:

(This is, I think, the most stupid and frequent mistake)

Because you can’t take a hundred bullets in the face, infiltration tends to be realistic. Not in the background or in your abilities, but in the weaknesses of your character. This is an important part of immersion. But this realistic side collapses everytime we see this: When you kill/knockdown a NPC, the body might be found by other NPCs, triggering the alert. So you hide in order to not get killed. And, after a certain amount of time, usually between one and two minutes, the alert stops, some gards return to their HQ, and the others simply continue their patrols.

I mean, “come on guys, you know I’m here and I am going to kill you. One of you is already down… Doesn’t it bothers you?”. In one minute of game, all of the immersion disapeared. In the Tenchu series, that goes so far that you can imitate a dog barking while a guard is looking for intruders, and the alert will immediatly stop.

I agree the game will become too hard for some players if there was constantly twice as much guards and if they were constantly looking for you and after each other. But still the fact that your plan failed has to have consequences, either the player will have more difficulties, or he will load and restart the room. Otherwise you break the immersion and the satisfaction, same way as in mistake one.

3. The “Obvious one alterate path” mistake:

As said before, a huge part of infiltration is thinking. Thinking of the right path to take, how many NPCs you will knock down, which first… It is a lot similar to the reasonning in a puzzle game such as Portal, just to quote one of the most famous. You have to think about what moves to do, in what order, what it will affect in the rest of the room.

But if puzzle games works with the “one problem-one solution” approach, it is different in infiltration. The problem, “how to pass the room,” is constently changing depending on the way you chose to take. It depends of the approach of the player. Is he the type of player that will try to kill every NPC in the room? Or will he simply try to sneak without any confrontation? Infiltration gives a lot of possibilities to player.

Now this mistake rarely applys to full-infiltration games, but mostly in other games which tries to add a small sequence of infiltration. Here is a meaningful example:

There is a corridor, two guards are talking. If you go ahead you will, no, you shall, get spotted. There is a ventilation shaft on your right, which you could’nt not notice. Good now take it… Crawl inside… Good, you are now three corridors ahead. You avoided confrontation using infiltration. Did you?

You see there the player did’nt though of how to do, or planned anything, he took the only path proposed that would’nt get his/her character killed. There is no Step 1, or Step 2 or 3. It is only a single path, hidden by the impression of another one, who leads to certain death.

These are the main mistakes to avoid while designing an infiltration game. This is saddly one of the fewest represented genre in video games, (as full-genre game). It is also one of those that can evolve the most (especially in IA). Yet today, the genre becomes more and more popular, thanks to cross-genre games that allow differents approaches, strating with the first Assassin’s Creed in 2007. Perhaps in few years we will see a boom of the infiltration genre…(source:gamasutra)