Enemy Alertness Changes for Stealth

[(PSN)Crixus044]

So warframe's stealth has gone through the ringer when it comes to mechanics. Enemies use to be oblivious to their partners dying right in front of them and arrows stuck in there butts. Now, any slight sound seems to startle them, causing a panic amongst the troops. The classic solution to stealthing is invisibility, but this is only part of the solution. Another solution is silence, which is almost impossible nowadays. You shoot an enemy with an arrow, and you may get one stealth kill, but the entire ship will know about it, and there goes your stealth. This happens every 30 seconds. If you tried to avoid it by melee stealthing, you're footsteps somehow set them off.

One of the best things in game is doing stealth finishers with pock-shots here and there. The problem with this is how alert levels function in this. You are only able to do finisher attacks on an enemy that in unalerted. This however is bypassed by staggers, sleep, or blinding effects, although by doing this, you still cannot return an enemy to an unalerted level. I would like to edit the way enemies become alerted.

Most games have different levels of alertness, but the way they transition between levels is variant on the game. In warframe, it is an instant shift, which I do not believe is the best choice from the gameplay perspective. I would like to smooth it out. I think that implementing a meter that can be filled up by the amount of presence a tenno has on an enemy would allow for much clearer and smoother stealth gameplay. Mainly when it comes to being spotted and soft noises.
For example, when a grineer sees a dead body, I would like the alertness meter to slowly fill up until it reaches a minor alertness level. same goes for hearing footsteps and whistling arrows/knives. If an enemy sees you in the distance, his bar will fill up quickly, and if it's a combination of things like seeing a dead body, whistling arrows and footsteps, his bar will fill up really quickly. BUT, even if his bar fills up, as long as he's not fully alerted in combat mode, you can STILL perform finishers on him and get the stealth bonus.
Any gunshot or non-silent ability used should as normal put enemies in a fully alerted level.
Once he's alerted at a minor level, another bar will have to fill up to get to the fully alerted state. Once minor alerted, any visual on a tenno is instant combat mode, as is a gunshot or noisy ability used. When alarms are set off, enemies are automatically put into the minor alert state, thus they can still be stealth killed and don't turn on the dime at the slightest step, but are not easy to get around because every action brings them closer to full combat mode, which brings sounding the alarm, locking down the ship, calling in reinforcements, etc.

I think this is a good balance of enemies awareness and player liberty. It won't feel like you're playing against a bunch of meatheads, but it will allow players to feel more effective and be rewarded for taking the more difficult and patient approach to the game. This of course would be best suited for players playing missions like exterminate, spy, sabotage, etc. and it won't interrupt the gameplay of missions like defense, survival, or exterminate. I hope you guys could get on board with this idea.

Thank You,
Chris

[TARINunit9]

Stealth in games is an eternal balancing act between making the stealth itself fun and/or viable, and not making enemies completely braindead. Sometimes one can be gained without huge losses on the other, but for the most part realistically smart guards are far more difficult to stealth against

Warframe has other unique problems: the procedural generation. The fact that this is a long-term grindfest game with completely random enemy spawns means the devs can't craft gratifying stealth encounters for us, merely praying that the tiles are set up with enough options for us to stealth it up. There's also the other big elephant in the room: the fact an entire three of the five enemy factions are immune to stealth and are ALWAYS on CONSTANT alert: Infested, Corrupted, and Sentient

[(PSN)Onder6099]

o/ Blast, I started tests with Blast Dmg and its quick disintegration, unfortunately I delayed them thanks to PoE and my search for best Loadout for them, I think our coop on Toxic Chroma will be finally rewarded. For now I would like to recommend to try Twin Basolk, 100% Status, pure Blast, no Finishers, Finishers don't Proc Status.

[(PSN)Crixus044]

9 hours ago, (PS4)Onder6099 said:

o/ Blast, I started tests with Blast Dmg and its quick disintegration, unfortunately I delayed them thanks to PoE and my search for best Loadout for them, I think our coop on Toxic Chroma will be finally rewarded. For now I would like to recommend to try Twin Basolk, 100% Status, pure Blast, no Finishers, Finishers don't Proc Status.

Yo Onder, what's up dude.

I think you posted in the wrong thread. lol

Edited October 12, 2017 by (PS4)Crixus044

[Hoshimiya.Sayo]

There's one thing that eternally bugs me about stealth : COLOUR CHOICE. In Warframe, no matter what, enemies will see you perfectly regardless of colour choice, which is an issue if you want to play stealth the old fashioned way (without invisibility and with silenced weapons). Alternatively, having camouflaged colours could reduce aggro and accuracy, while bright colours would increase those. It simply makes no sense that having a frame with colours that blend in with the environment would still be as visible as some hot pink Rhino stomping around.

[(PSN)Crixus044]

On 10/12/2017 at 12:08 AM, TARINunit9 said:

Stealth in games is an eternal balancing act between making the stealth itself fun and/or viable, and not making enemies completely braindead. Sometimes one can be gained without huge losses on the other, but for the most part realistically smart guards are far more difficult to stealth against

Warframe has other unique problems: the procedural generation. The fact that this is a long-term grindfest game with completely random enemy spawns means the devs can't craft gratifying stealth encounters for us, merely praying that the tiles are set up with enough options for us to stealth it up. There's also the other big elephant in the room: the fact an entire three of the five enemy factions are immune to stealth and are ALWAYS on CONSTANT alert: Infested, Corrupted, and Sentient

That's why i believe that instead of having "dark zones" in a map, they need a consistent formula to how enemies are affected by awareness. This idea is already currently implemented, but at a primitive level. This is why i believe an awareness meter fits in perfectly to both give time to the player to react to enemy actions, while making the grineer still reactive to our actions.

2 hours ago, Xhouliy said:

There's one thing that eternally bugs me about stealth : COLOUR CHOICE. In Warframe, no matter what, enemies will see you perfectly regardless of colour choice, which is an issue if you want to play stealth the old fashioned way (without invisibility and with silenced weapons). Alternatively, having camouflaged colours could reduce aggro and accuracy, while bright colours would increase those. It simply makes no sense that having a frame with colours that blend in with the environment would still be as visible as some hot pink Rhino stomping around.

Am interesting concept, but i don't believe can work properly. If you look closely, very few enemies actually use sight. Corpus especially. They may be using advanced optics and motion detectors. Thus your silhouette may actually stand out.

Of course this is just a theory, but if you were able to color your Warframe to camouflage yourself, that'd be incredibly badass and i'd love to do that. Perhaps making myself look like infested to have the infested attack my less aggressively.