Phosphor [&]

As a player of Warframe, I too dislike stealth missions.

I play them only when mandatory and use Wukong's 2 to speed at mach 1000 up through the traps, autohacking doors with ciphers to basically beat the clock with speed alone. Because doing stealth properly is SLOW. Taking 20 minutes to do a 5 minute mission is SLOW.

And if I have to do the mission 50 times for a fucking warframe part, I don't want it to be SLOW.

Games where stealth is THE focus are great. Thief 1-3 will always be a pinnacle, I think. Level layouts, tools, expectations of speed, enemy response, they're all tuned to the idea that you WILL be sneaking and that your character is a master at it.

it's like everyone wants to be Thief: The Dark Project but no one wants to put in the work; not that Thief was perfect but rarely does anyone reach the same highs as its highs: tools for getting around, and options for when that doesn't work, though spend too much time in combat and you're still in a fail state -- but it's a fail state you could have possibly escaped from.

Probably the best pass/fail systems I've played and enjoyed were Shadwen, which was savaged at the time if I recall correctly but I thought it was fine, and Timelie, which has time rewind. Both are, honestly, more like puzzle games where the puzzle is being a sneaky one.

I'm trying to think if I've played any other stealth-stealth games and I'm drawing a blank right now.

I hadn't thought about it in these terms before but the thing separating Stealth Gameplay I Did Enjoy back in early World of Warcraft (cat form go!) from Stealth Gameplay I Do NOT Enjoy in a lot of modern video games that want to inexplicably shoehorn it in is... actually pretty much exactly what you said about pass/fail vs ideal/plan 2.

Because from one perspective stealthing as a cat druid was pass/fail: a lot of what I was sneaking past would just murder me if I screwed up. But the subjective experience was a sense of brushing myself off if things went bad, or in rare situations trying to gank the mob(s) so I could resume sneaking. In both cases I felt like I got so much practice with the stealth mechanics that the jank was overcome by the predictability. It got to a point where most screw-ups felt like player consequences

(Also it helped that WoW was a game where they didn't "schedule" your paths so tightly like you discuss in having to wait for everyone to go back to the right place in their pathing for your next opportunity to move forward. I waited for mobs sometimes, but infrequently and more on a scale of 10 seconds.)

Hilariously I won't complain about Warframe because right around the time I started to feel like I was learning how it worked I finished building Ivara and then the next 1k hours of gameplay for me were "sneak time? IVARA ON ALL FOURS OPENING EVERY LOCKER IN THE LEVEL, PERMANENTLY INVISIBLE FOR 27 MINUTES"

Gosh yes as a person who enjoys being stealthy in video games, like I feel like if a game is not structured around stealth, then it does not need a stealth mission that is any more complicated than "the single npc in this area has turned his back BOOK IT TO THE VERY OBVIOUS NEXT SAFE ZONE! before he turns around in a very generous amount of time!" Because what makes stealth games fun (for me) is the problem-solving aspects, and you generally need a whole set of tools and game play mechanics specifically for stealthing to make that engaging. (Though I will just take "absurd stat that just makes me functionally invisible k thx" in non-stealth-based games because the other bit that is fun about being stealthy is getting into things you're not "supposed" to, including rooms, locked containers, and people's pockets and sometimes that is the whole reason I am playing this stealth-class in a non-stealth game.)

I suspect there are people out there who enjoy the realism of having to watch guards go by for 20 minutes until you figure out the pattern. I admit I don't completely hate this so long as it An Option and not the one and only way to do something. And that's part of what makes good stealth good. Options! Yeah, you can spend 20 minutes of your real life crouched in the shadows watching npcs wander about until you figure out the perfect moment to sneak by. Or you can sneak through the conveniently large hvac system that you have the tools to access because You Are Prepared/Skilled. Or you can creep up behind people and murder them and drag the bodies to a hiding place. Or you could acquire a disguise (that's only good in certain locations or so long as you don't do certain specific forbidden things while wearing it) Or you can toss "sleep dust" in someone's face or shoot them with a tranq dart! Or you can desperately skitter from hiding place to hiding place, feeling relatively secure in the hiding spot, but nervous that you might get spotted enroute. You don't need all of these in one game, but like you need a handful to account for people's play styles and boredom tolerance and to give people various things to try (mmm! replayability!)