You got to play the good games.
That’s your only teacher / anything that matters.
Pull out a Thief Gold copy, mod it up so its got more poly than you know what to do with. Play though the levels.
Then Thief 2 - and note that the last level with bits of non exactly eucledean geometry was essentially industry changing.
Realistically you could stop there.
If your team manages to make a game that good with so little gameplay, then whatever else you add is going to make it worse…
Thief 3 was a in fact a big let down comparatively, and thief 4 is just a different franchise because Edios ruined it for all.
(Well realistically the fall of Looking Glass is what ruined it But this isn’t an History lesson?)
So then what?
Well the folks at looking glass, some of em anyway, ended up at Arkane Studios.
And so cue up Dishonored.
Now, while 1 was good, personally I think they had some bad acid trips before making 2 and everything that followed it, so not sure they would be worth analyzing. Matter of fact, most of the levels become repetitive bt then.
Meanwhile, in unrelated and more acrive stealth AC came along.
Out of all of them, you probably only need to play the best of the lot, AC2, mostly in Venice.
The open level design and use of parkour movements was far more impressive than the ancestor’s AC1.
either way, a far cry from how simple yet good Thief was given the near 10 (1998 to 2009)… year of age…
There is one more moedern entry that can make the cut when it comes to level design, and that’s A Plague Tale: Innocence. The gameplay is only “so so” but the level design and shadow play is great.
(On that, Requiem the second one alsow showcases another studio victim of heavy â– â– â– dosing, this time though no one tried to hide it. The whole game became blatantly mental. And only gets worse as you progress).
Last honorable mention:
Skyrim. Not because its great at stealth, but because the level design and tenchiques (which you can google for btw) were and still are great.
The concept of being able to have a whole room made up of 1 texture without you being able to spot it at all when you look at objects/clutter and geometry is pretty useful to begin with.
And makes for great in game perfomance…
All this mentioned, an observation if you will.
Most books on level design teach you how to mentally drive the player with visual cues.
In good stealth games this is almost Never the case.
The player is supposed to get lost and not know exactly where to go, if you start to try to curtail their freedom, the game itself becomes bland to downright unolayable (thief 4? Anyone?).
Oh and you know what…
I did skip over a wee bit of history of stealth there.
Pandora Tomorrow ans Chaos Theory were actually the preconceptual Ubi-Montreal version of AC. Its just too bad they forgot they even made them and started shoveling dodo in player’s faces with their pay to win schemes now a days… either way, the gameplay here was some of the best stealth driven stuff that still holds up well.
Level design wise, not really that much. What Sam Fisher could do was far more fun then the levels you could do it in…
Stealth by Sticky Camera gas knockouts…