Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints

What do you think of EE difficulty in MGS? I enjoy trying to deal with the consequences of getting spot, calculating your approach and playing well to get out of a tight spot. But on EE, all that tension disappears because the game ends right away. It feels extremely rigid, though it does makesense that you’d be finished if the entire base was alerted to your presence. 😛

Okay, the big deal is, MGS3 has a flexible enough spotting and investigation mechanic that a lot of shit can go on before you actually get an alert, and you can mess up a fair amount without getting totally caught. You can lead guards around, do all sorts of silly stuff. Watch those skill videos for MGS3 on youtube

Almost no alerts in this entire vid, only an alert when he wants there to be one.

MGS3 is a robust enough game that there is a massive amount of depth in the stealth systems, all the things you can do while undetected. Comparatively, if you get an alert, there isn’t as much you can do. Guards are at least mildly psychic, and can follow you around fairly well. Gun combat in MGS has never been amazing, running away and hiding can be a time consuming drag. You don’t get mid-combat stealth like in far cry 3 blood dragon or crysis warhead.

European Extreme trims that stuff out. You want to play the game entirely stealthy? Lets cut out the rest for you, don’t have to wait to get back in the action. Sure, it’s rigid, but that’s because stealth mechanics in general are rigid. In regular combat, you typically have a lot of health and enemies attack with things that can be avoided in a lot of games, but in stealth games, they “attack” with vision cones, which can be swiveled around quickly. It’s a bit like a shmup with more complex enemy behavior, you gotta dodge the vision cones using movement (from one manner of seeing things).

The other thing is, the rigidity of the system in that one particular aspect means you cannot progress without the use of stealth. Most stealth games are not played stealthy in speedruns, because it’s slower. It’s almost always slower in any game to engage an enemy rather than run away from them. In the case of most stealth games, it’s also easier to just trigger an alert and run past everyone, then wait until the alert dies down to continue if there’s a stealth-only door. I did it a lot in my more amateur MGS3 runs. EE prevents you from cheesing the game as easily.

Here’s a diagram that’s often cited in discussions like these. Unfortunately, no stealth game seems to really be an exception to this.