We speak to the most prominent triple-A and indie stealth developers of 2012 to shed light on the state of the sneak-’em-up and the future of stealth gameplay.
Welcome to Trade Secrets. We’ve been working on this massive interview series for some time now, and we’re proud to finally share it with you. We set out to ask a few simple questions of today’s stealth developers to discover where the genre is headed, and the philosophies behind that momentum.
Over the course of the next nine days, we’ll be releasing a new interview each day. This post serves as a hub for those interviews, of which you can see the complete line-up below. Click the banner images to be taken through to the full interview when they become available.
We hope you enjoy Trade Secrets, and we’d like to thank every developer here for taking the time to be a part of it.
Co-creative Directors Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio talk simulation, analogue awareness and player choice within the stealth spectrum.
The founder of Pocketwatch games, Andy Schatz, believes stealth to be a genre-less concept, defined by the thrill of getting caught.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s Game Director, Jean-Francois Dugas, wants failure to become an accepted part of stealth gameplay.
Lantana Games’ Dan Silvers, designer of Children of Liberty, wants to see stealth break into other genres like real-time strategy.
Michal Marcinkowski, designer of Link-Dead, believes gaming’s shift to casual inclusiveness is at odds with the challenge inherent to the stealth genre.
Klei Entertainment’s Nels Anderson believes deep, systemic reactions are the key to engaging stealth gameplay.
Aduge Studio’s Creative Director of Qasir Al-Wasat, Bruno Bulhoes, sees indie developers as the future for pure stealth titles.
Depth Team’s lead developer, Alex Quick, thinks singleplayer stealth games simply can’t compare with the thrill of matching wits with another human being.
With the success of crowd-funding for niche genres, Project Stealth’s Frank van Gemeren believes now is the time to wake the slumbering stealth community.
Gunpoint’s Tom Francis believes stealth is alive and kicking – so much so that other genres could learn a thing or two from its intricacies.
Trade Secrets concludes with an interview with Ubisoft Toronto’s Patrick Redding, Game Director on the next Splinter Cell title.
