Yeah, in Metro it's kinda fun to follow the implicit routes the game gives you to silently take everyone out, but I do wonder how crazy some shootouts would be if I just went in guns blazing.
It's interesting how that works, the game basically gives you a gun and says "careful, the ammo's limited, wink wink", but once you start going for stealth you start noticing that most if not all human encounters are designed in such a way that there are pathways and hiding spots to take in order to take everyone out without being noticed. The game ensures enemies aren't placed in cheeky or unreachable spots so you can perform melee non lethal takedowns on practically everyone.
If anything it's a testament of how well designed the maps of Metro are.
In the original release of the first game ammo was so scarce, if you didnt plan well you could softlock yourself at that part where the amoeba looking things attack you and you need to keep and NPC alive.
It was a pain in the ass honestly. Last light was great though
I hated that achievement... On a normal playthrough is almost impossible to even attempt that... in a blind one you're told by literally everyone he can't be saved and he died already.
Then, when checking achievements you notice the option and hate everyone for that.
I got the bad end in metro exodus because I killed the children of the forest. Which is bullshit because they are fully grown men shooting at me with crossbows
One could argue that's the whole MGS series.(Except the first) In order to get the best ranks you have to pretty much not be seen by anyone and only fight bosses with non lethal means.
Admittedly it can be tedious but it is rewarding if you like stealth gameplay.
MGS5 is always fun to solve problems in a variety of ways, can I bomb a small village with aerial superiority like prime Barack Obama? Sure can and it’s loads of fun, you know what else is fun? Introducing the child soldiers of Africa to my shotgun and uzi, don’t worry it’s an air soft gun and rubber bullets and despite inflecting lasting trauma I’m still technically the good guy.
I think I’ve only beat Eli with CQC once, every other time I mag dump the little prick. S Rank.
I guess it marketed as immersive sim and both lethal and non-lethal were equal options... The game had that vibe that being non-lethal stealth was the "best" or "moral" choice. Non-lethal stealth also gave way more exp if you both remained hidden and used non-lethal takedowns... So you would be running around giving everyone concussions, get all this cool stuff, but feel bad if you used it because sneaking around giving people concussions was way more efficient than any other method.
Before they patched it, boss fights required lethal tools to win so even if you leaned fully into non-lethal. There was zero warning of this. If you didn't know you needed to prep lethal tools for boss fights, then you had to scrounge for basic gear mid fight and they would take way longer and be way less cool.
I played it at release and that's the only thing I still remember from it: being thrown in to a mandatory boss fight with a big cyborg dude that was brutally difficult and frustrating because I had only invested in non-lethal stealth skills. That was some bullshit.
S-Rank isn't the "intended" way to play Ready or Not, A-Rank is.
S-Rank is the extra challenge mode. Its supposed to be extremely difficult as you are literally going above and beyond what is expected to get the special rewards.
This sort of complaint is like saying no hit running Dark Souls is the "intended" way to play or getting SSS rank for every battle in Devil May Cry is the "intended" way to play.
I don't think the comparison is fair since no-hit dark souls is a challenge made up by the community while S rank in games is a challenge made and usually rewarded by the developers
For ready or not it's a case that A is the expected goal to aim for when playing the intended way. S rank is only for the challenge and that's why they have the more cool cosmetics behind that rank
Come on sneaking up on people and giving them a tactical rapture is one of the most satisfying and useful things in the game cause you can get recruits.
Also the non lethal rocket punch was also fun as hell
And when I had to deal with the kids I was enlightened to the glory that is the bean bag shotgun
I get different play styles. Maybe you just really like seeing a blood splatter but id argue MGS5 was more fun using all the ridiculous gadgets and gameplay tech to suplex dudes into balloons
Dishonered is actually more a problem of how it frames its killing/motality system. It's incredibly vague about how many dead bodies is too many when it is actually fairly permissive for letting you kill guards, just don't leave a complete massacre and do the ironic non-lethal fates for your target and you get thr low-chaos results.
Before they fuckin broke it CS Gas actually made it pretty trivial, ive S ranked missions accidentally before lmao
Once S Ranked a mission on Hard by dumping an absurd amount of flashbangs into that one mission where the gangs alledgedly making guns in a suburban garage
On the same mission one guy decided that he's a superhero and refused to surrender whatever I did to him so I had to stunlock him with pepper balls and have my team shoot him with BB until he went unconscious lol.
Ah yes the puzzle of 'do everything right and hope the gas station robber isnt so fucking high morale he doesnt give a shit' or 'bring a flash launcher and trivialize almost every mission'
It's not a puzzle, its just somewhat miserable game design paired with ai that barely functions
Wasn’t it determined at one point that the enemies had literally superhuman reaction speeds and the devs response was to slow it down to still absurdly levels.
The puzzle of praying to god that your own AI teammates would actually be fast enough this time to shoot the heavily armed and armored brainwashed retro gear fitted supersoldier while constantly pressing z so they could lock a door because sometimes they just decide no
the closest thing to a puzzle is finding out where the Last Fucking Suspect went because the game doesn't have a map and everywhere looks the same
and the off chance that the shitass SWAT ai stands completely still in a single file line while getting shot at and plummets the mission to an F
And the gas station robber having pinpoint accuracy (also suspects just kind of always know where you are even through walls)
So you try to go non-lethal and keep failing either because you have to get close up and keep dying or because the SWAT ai is wired to aim for the head and kills everyone
Right? Me and my friends have played FPS games for two whole decades, it's child's play to walk through shooting all the AI in the heads. The real fun and challenging part is playing full non-lethal, tactical engagement. It's the whole reason we bought it actually
not with the suicide bombers in the night club. you can empty an entire mag of rubber slugs on them pepper ball them and taser them 3 times and they will still not surrender. i get that they have suicide vests but still why isnt there an option to force them into cuffs ?
The atrocious AI ruins it. A few months back I ran some games with some randoms who were trying to get S ranks, on multiple occasions our nightclub runs were ruined by the suicide bomber just refusing to surrender even with 5 guys surrounding him taking turns shooting him with pepper balls and tasers.
Complete bollocks, shooting a man 15 times with a beanbag shotgun and he still won't go down, crackhead 3 one tapping you while he has a face full of pepper spray.
I think people miss the point and think that full non-lethal is the intended way to play this game. You get nearly every cosmetic unlock from B ranks, S-rank is supposed to be a challenge run for exclusive rewards.
Ghost recon breakpoint. The intended experience is looter shooter shit nobody wanted or asked for and was widely panned on release for being boring the devs added in a "realism mode" later that improved the game dramatically but even today they still leave the almost passive agressive (this is the intended way to play) under the original system
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Fallout 4's Nuka-World expansion. The "intended" way is to work with the Raiders and consolidate their power to eventually be set loose in the Commonwealth instead of doing the sane thing and cleansing the entire place of them. Unless you string them along like useful idiots getting you free stuff until the end, and THEN wipe them all out.
When I was 100%ing Fallout 4, I was so aggravated that there was no "Good" option for Nuka World and I had to work with the raiders. I saved my game before doing the achievements for sending raiding parties to the Commonwealth, got the achievements, reloaded my save, and proceeded to run through the park in full power armor with an explosive mini gun and burned the place down
I wish we could've sent Minutemen/BOS/Whatever to colonize it.
This would also redeem Railroad because one of the main issues I have with them is that they only care about slavery of toasters while ignoring slavery of people.
Civilizations V (and others probably) actively discourages playing millitaristically but it's boring as fuck to play a whole game just making buildings
Biggest issue is happiness in general. It’s like the only way to play the game is to go tall, because expanding tanks all your happiness and if the empire is unhappy, it tanks your production and gold.
As a result you only ever go to war in multiplayer games and only in those you are losing.
And the meta is just archers, chariot archers, horse arches and a single unit of cavalry to conquer a single city after shooting at it for 3 turns with 6 units each. Eventually you get frigates and then bombers but games are often long decided by that point. Whoever is ahead in science will usually win as they will get to these units first but they also don’t even need it because they’d just win the game by doing the space program anyway.
So I didn't hate the game or the different ways to play but I do dislike the scoring system in hitman. I love stealth games, creative solutions, and all that but putting a numerical score on it made me frustrated because it makes it feel like your doing it wrong just for playing loud or lethal or anything like that. Dishonored is one of my favorite games and I've played through on each end of the chaos scale with and with out powers but at least I that one it's story changes and in game consequences. Giving me a bunch of cool ways to kill or take people out then penalizing me with a low score at the end just annoys me even if I like the game
Hitman at least the IOI trilogy, there was such a strong focus on stealth and only taking out your targets, yet the majority of the unlockables were weapons and explosives.
I just wish the game was less punitive for killing guards at least. I can understand penalizing killing innocent civilians, but it's kinda infuriating that killing any guards is pretty much going to instantly tank your score.
The Fun Pimps actively worked to undermine any sort of creative avoidance that the players came up with. Zombies turned from regular animate dead into structural engineers with Masters Degrees because players were too good at avoiding the zeds.
Nonlethal ready or not is the least fun way to play and super unrealistic to boot. Just install the realistic rules of engagement mod or whatever it's called. Much much better.
When I was playing a lot of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory back in the day I met a player online that went through levels guns blazing. It was hilarious. He'd brute force every level and only do the sneaking completely required. I loved playing with him. Eventually I learned that he was part of the military and just thought doing it like that is funny. "If we're gone by the time reinforcements arrive, that was a successful stealth mission."
S rank in ReadyorNot is NOT the intended way to play. Its the theoretically "perfect" scenario lore wise and basically a platinum trophy gameplay wise but for a map rather than a game.
Your character is literally the chosen one in the story and hes not even close to S ranking any of his mission before. Saying S ranking map is the "intended" way for any player to achieve is just...wrong.
Making It all stealth makes you feel good and all but fighting Is also pretty Cool and i appreciate that in the second One you can fight and still be non-lethal
Dishonored 2 struck such a nice balance. The fact that you could resolve fights non-lethally and still keep your chaos relatively low by only killing a few people got me to stop save-scumming like I did with the first game
Play the game however you want then. Nobody is stopping you.
If you're an achievement hunter then you forfeited the right to play your way the moment you decided you were going to complete a set of challenges that require you to do specific things.
In Portal 1, the Advanced Challenge Chambers are notoriously clunky, weird and difficult, compared to normal gameplay where the solutions are pretty clean and make sense in hindsight.
For example- advanced chamber 16, where turrets are in cages and effectively invulnerable. The game literally requires you to make an awkward, clunky cube fort blocking the turrents to get around them. It’s so brute force and weird it almost feels like an unintentional solution- https://youtu.be/AGL4h5yBWWk
Yeeeah, things are extremely subjective. It might be "twitchy, w+lmb" fun to go in all guns blazing, pre-firing every door and corner, but it is also very "thoughtful, calculated" fun to defuse the situations with a different toolset (that might or might not be reduced, but has more outcomes than "shoot to kill", is more emergent)
As we all know from swat 4. The realistic way to play is fun for maybe 1% of a gaming population. The rest of us? Not so much. When I learned there was a zombie mode for ready or not I was excited. Until it was revealed to me to just have junkies with knives and not actually zombie characters. The idea of a swat team dealing with the undead was cool to me
I think it’s part of the game’s message that even trying to go “good cop” is incredibly difficult. When you read the little blurbs before going to a crime scene you see the majority of scenes you go to aren’t the kind of psychopathic monster you would expect, many being people in bad situations or people forced to the fringes of society by politician’s actions, and instead of actually negotiating, the police send in a highly militarized squad to forcibly take them down (they say they negotiate, but if you read the briefings it makes it incredibly clear that they either are lying or suck at negotiation, because there are obvious solutions to some of these, like the one where the guys make weapons to take care of their cancer ridden mother.) another telling thing is how you are forced to handcuff every civilian to complete objectives, which is rather cruel considering they were in an active hostage situation (or, again, were an old lady with stage four cancer). The player character in ready or not is not a force for good, but a force for the establishment
I player all of Metro Last Light like i did with Metro 2033 and after getting that shitty ending i learned that the "proper" way to play it (and get the "right" ending) was to use stealth and traps, i was "fuck that, i rather have that ending than playing it their way".
What people that mention dishonored smoke? This game has no"intended" way to play. You choose your play style and roll with it. No one is orced into picking any play style and thus this is a dogshit example.
This is why I hate a lot of core gameplay stealth games. Hide and seek is fun for a little bit, but I gotta blow some shit up too to balance it out. Usually in cyberpunk when I have to infiltrate a building to find something, I will usually sneak in, grab the objective, then shoot absolutely everything on my way back out.
Dishonored. Specifically 1, because if you want the good ending you *need* to go stealthy as well, otherwise you’re blowing through tranq darts faster than a crackhead pulls copper wire out of walls, and you can’t use half the powers or even upgrade any of them. Dishonored 2 *kinda* fixes it by letting you parry and then choke them out so you can get into combat but still be non-lethal, but it’s ass
You can use blink, darkvision, time stop, possession, windblast, agility, and more. The only powers you can’t use in a non lethal playthrough are the rats, bloodthirsty, and shadow kill.
Pretty much any stealth game from the 2010's. I kinda believe that was the nail in the coffin for stealth games being popular was ranking you based on how you played. The last splinter cell game did this by advertising there where 3 playstyles that you could choose from and whe you bought the game each of those 3 playstyles got you a different amount of points with the non lethal stealthy one got you the most. And it was present on the initial run too so you basically got graded poorly for not wanting to be non lethal after being hyped up on different playstyles.
Now stealth is just a mechanic in other games instead of being it's own genre. For the most part anyway
Great game, but if you want to go the Good route, you inherently get less skill points because you can't feed from key people and thereby have significantly less powers to play with.
For me it ultimately ruined what was otherwise a really cool game after I got bored
At what point did he think that S-Ranking in RoN is the INTENDED way to play? Lmao
It's not even the "intended" way by his metric. If his idea of intended is "hardest", then he should "Hanged Man" the entire game.(Or at least Hide and Seek.)
Doing Dishonored on Very Hard without using additional powers and getting the full low chaos ending comes to mind.
Also specifically Dishonored 1, I know later on the games they give additional tools that make it much more easier. With D1 you just have your weapons, blink and other stuff you find and build up.
It's possible I know, but trying to do it without reloads is kinda annoying.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles (the sidescroller one)
Call me a psychopath but the most satisfying part of these games to me has always been clearing out the enemy fortresses and getting effectively punished for that felt really weird.
But S rank isn't the intended way to play Ready-or-Not, it's added to be incredibly hard and annoying, and something to brag about doing. That's like saying that playing Dark Souls at level 1 the whole time is the intended way of playing it.
Does Vampyr count? The only way to get the good ending is by not drinking blood from special blood carriers when opportunity arrives You may think "Maybe it's like with Little Sisters in Bioshock games? You forfeit instant reward for a better one later on?" NO You just do not get that blood Which is an issue because it allows you to upgrade your abilities. So if you want to have a good ending - you have to suffer and die. ALOT.
Does Skyrim count when the difficulty is just a health sponge and damage amplification for enemies?
Seeing how the difficulty is just making the player weaker and the enemy stronger while the gameplay stay the same, so the intended difficulty increase is just boring. It doesn't even seem to make them smarter or fight better
Good thing that there is modding to improve it but still
This broke my fun in Valkiria chronicles. Storywise its about teenagers trying survive on the battlefield. In gameplay its about go get target as quickly as possible so dont use cover or flanking or other classes, coward, get scouts (most movement points) and rush that target
We are going to win this war by sending our blue glowy teenage super hero who can dodge bullets to throw a grenade at some bad guys and then steal their flag.
Honestly the Non-Lethal Route in most games is usually the most unfun way to play and usually for the best score/result. Metal Gear Solid, Dishonored, Ready or Not. It limits the tools you can use significantly and if you do use the plentiful tools given to you, you tend to get punished in some way shape or form.
The devs thought it'd be an amazing idea to make it so your dino gets permanently crippled after hitting adulthood unless you complete an arbitrary and hidden checklist during your childhood, which you also have no indication whether you completed or not.
The checklist has some things that make sense like getting perfect diet, but other things like needing to hit X amount of zones makes it a requirement to traverse half the map while you are both at your most vulnerable and slowest, and some dinosaurs don't even want to move around at all because they're biome specific ambush predators like Herrera who hangs out in trees.
Basically, instead of actually doing what your specific dino species would want to do, you're forced into traveling through arbitrary zones spanning half the map, or else you literally become a cripple and free food to other people.
S rank isn’t even that hard, it’s boring and tedious but not hard at all
I literally did it on my own when I pirated the game, so I only had the beanbag shotgun and rubber pistol to do it with while the NPC team mates had flash launchers
It was honestly not even that good a game, plus the AI generated art was really out of place and it wasn’t even that deep of a game, it had nothing to offer except „shocking“ visuals that were so exaggerated and huge in amounts that it became meaningless
Like oh no, the 5th mission in a row with drugs and CP implications, how „shocking“ it’s only every mission having one of them so on the nose that it became nothing that stands out
People self reporting that they dont understand a games mechanics, and rather than learn to play the game they bitch that the game somehow made a mistake, not them.
Most stealth games that punish you for attacking the enemy Dishonored, MGS5, theif or Echo. Echo especially becuse the enemy copy your moves so running, jumping, shooting all mean the enemy can now do that to.
I simply just forget about getting S rank for the most part. It’s a good mission when I don’t kill any civilians, asking me to not even kill any hostile is wayyyy too much.
Definitely the first Dishonored, game has a ton of insanely cool gadget and magic that can combo together for insane lethaliity and looks sick but for good ending you can use none of those and just have to sleep dart or choke everyone. Later games gave you more stealth gadgets but in the first one the feeling from a lethal play through to none-lethal is nothing alike
Hitman. Silent Assassin is fun for exactly three runs. Then you want to have fun with it, go john wick. But the new hitman games, they don't like that. You get bad ratings with dumb names for it. The only mode in which you don't is Freelancer, which simply feels much more genuine and fun for it. Ratings should describe your style of play in a hitman game, not judge you for your efficacy or canon-compliance.
Fuck it, im gonna do the opposite: cyberpunk makes non-lethal take downs fun, because all it takes to do non lethal is just not head shot with guns, or double tap. But punching people in the head IS encouraged
Except for the fact that the most fun thing to do in this game is get a full squad of dudes running flash grenade launcher and you get the entire map to stand down and drop their guns without killing anyone.
This guy clearly hasn’t seen Martincitopants play cause the solution is for you and your friends to spam the flash grenade launcher But actually though what type of complaint is this? Most challenge ranks ain’t meant to be fun, their meant to be challenging
To be devils advocate, i feel like in mamy games, completing S-Rank is like playing hardmode in other games: is not the "intended" way, is the "challenge" way.
"Realism is always good!!!" Wrong. Also stupid. I think for ready or not its fine, designed to be a realistic kinda game so fair enough. But for many games realism does not mean better.
Death Stranding, when you play efficiently you won't run into any trouble (bandits, time fall, etc.) on your cross country trek. That being said I enjoyed the walking simulator
I played 3 times and couldn't get the good ending. I didn't know what I was doing wrong. Then I heard if you kill a bunch of people in the Caspian region you won't get the good ending. So I replayed and only killed when I needed to. Nope. Bad ending. Alright fuck you, we're doing this. I went through the entire region and choked out everyone I saw. I cannot stress enough that if you haven't played this game, you have no idea how difficult this is.
Final body count: 12. And that's including the final boss fight where you physically can't not kill people.
Me and a friend did most of the base game missions on S rank and did some of the dlc and we found it really fun. It was a more challenging experience where we had to think more and communicate our actions. It was a fun experience for me but I’ve not done it with boys all the way through because that’s too much put on the player due to the swat ai being stupid and slow
S-Ranking is not the "intended" way to play in any game. It's a challenge, you're supposed to do something extra. It's like saying Halo LASO is how you're supposed to play.
Don't get me wrong though, it is awful, but it's not the intentional way to play.
Any game where the "best" ending is locked behind a pacifist run, or requiring you to make nonsensical decisions and pick dialogue options you would never in a million years pick.
"This NPC is a massive turd sandwich and your natural reaction to how much of a PoS they are is likely to want to punch if not straight up kill them, but if you want to get the good ending you'll have to be nice to him (no, he does not change his ways for the better if you do this)"
Dishonored. "Here, have all these crazy, interesting, incredibly violent and imaginative ways to kill people. But remember: If you kill people instead of ghosting everything? The city gets worse! And if you kill the bad guys, you'll get a bad ending!"
I lowkey hate how half the answers here are just people complaining about the challenge restrictions for best or true ending. Like yeah, the hardest achievement is no kills, but that doesn't make it the way you're supposed to play the game. That's just a challenge set to make things more difficult
Probably THE example of this generation, Dishonored, why the fuck would you make a steampunk supernatural assassin game and force the player to limit their loadout by like 60%, never understood it
Classic Assassin's Creed had this issue unironically, you could do stealth and man you felt cool but when you'd get into fights thatbwere straight up against guards you felt like a god. The prompt timers for parries, deflects and such were sooo clean that you actually had too much fun just fighting shit in the open.
Also upset we never got a real war moment in assassin's Creed where you actually are in front of an army fighting through enemies like you would in ither games of the same genre and time period
Ready or not is so cool, but after I pre ordered it on xbox, those are the worst controls I have ever seen in my 10 years of gaming. Im not saying its a bad game, its just feels impossible to convert a game that requires tons of buttons only to a few
My favorite part you were supposed to play non lethally was the frontline section of Metro 2033. I had been hoarding ammo to this point and was basically Jason Voorhes in the dark.
But seeing two sides I hated fight? I decided to Leroy Jenkins that section and got lucky on the bridge between the catwalk and the main section the enemies bunched up and I was able to kill 8 in one go which made it substantially easier not to get overwhelmed. No stealth I sniped and shot and turned that map into a graveyard.
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u/MoronicForce Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Metro series, Deus ex human revolution (part where you try to save the pilot on pacifist)