Ideas for stealth kills

[Mati9319]

I just came up with it and I think it may actually work!


First of all, in order to trigger a stealth kill, ALL of the following requirements must be met:

• our victim doesn't know about our presence (in other words: we need to approach them silently, without being seen by them or by any other NPCs),
• we are standing right behind our victim, facing their back,
• we have a dagger equipped,
• our victim isn't wearing any hard armor around their neck (e.g. plates).

If all the requirements are met, pressing LMB (while in combat mode of course) would start a stealth kill.

Now, I understand that executing a stealth kill using game engine's physics would be EXTREMELY hard to design and make it work. So this is my idea on how to handle stealth kills:

From the moment of pressing LMB, our character and their victim would both enter state in which they're not affected by game's physics and instead, the actual kill would be handled with a scripted animation. E.g. our character grabs their victim's shoulder with left hand and - at the same - slits their throat with the dagger held in right hand. Right after victim's throat is slit (the moment our dagger ceases contact with victim's neck), the scripted movements would end and both characters would return to their natural - physics driven - state:

• our character fluidly returns to normal combat stance,
• our victim's body falls onto the ground.

 

[winterline]

I like the idea of stealth kills however I do not like the idea of scripted animation. The absence of any scripted animation is what makes this game so unique, every other game uses scripted animation, hopefully that is not added to this gem of a game.

 

[BadCompany141]

muscle tension of the sorts(?) was added recently or so I thought i've seen it added, so a mace/blunt overhead to the head dealing double damage due to unawareness + the physique of your character should suffice

 

[Mati9319]

muscle tension of the sorts(?) was added recently or so I thought i've seen it added, so a mace/blunt overhead to the head dealing double damage due to unawareness + the physique of your character should suffice

Sounds fair enough, but will it be silent enough to not raise any suspicion around us? I hope so.

 

[Midcal9]

That's a DS backstab, basically. Every DS player has a love hate reltionship with it. Actually it's more akin to Dark Messiah neck/shoulder stab, which is cool and totally appropriate for that game but in Exanima..ehh..It would like a huge cheese elephant in the diner.

 

[Orlacktherof]

If you want to kill someone stealthily, do it from far away...

 

[Midcal9]

I expect ranged weapons to be a massive problem. You would shoot an enemy across the large room, damage his health by roughly 15% and then you will fail to change weapons in time. I had similar problems with the torch and I don't expect the bow to be any better. Plus they will probably come up with some tricky firing mechanic where you'd have to pull the bow string by moving your mouse. It won't be a simple aim click weapon that's for sure.

 

[Mati9319]

If you want to kill someone stealthily, do it from far away...

Sounds good too, but shooting someone right in the head is probably going to be extremely tricky... or not?

Also (regarding "from far away" idea) it would be great to be able to cause accidents (poisoning food or just using game physics properly). Now THAT would be a perfectly stealth way to kill someone, because no one will ever think that this person was killed by someone, when it will be an accident! This kind of assassinations was perfectly executed in "Hitman: Blood Money" and can even be done better (I think) in "Sui Generis", using its' physics engine!

 

[Orlacktherof]

An arrow is not going to lightly wound someone

snip

Say we prop an anvil on a door...

 

[zhuliks]

Will never happen, no double damage, no stealth kill animations.

All you can hope for is to creep on someone and sneak in first hit, which can decide whole duel as usually heavy overhead knocks people down and you can finish them.

 

[Mati9319]

An arrow is not going to lightly wound someone

I never said it is, only that it's probably gonna be really tricky to score a headshot (which I wouldn't mind as long as it can be mastered like pugilism matches for example).

Say we prop an anvil on a door...

A bit cliché to be honest, but certainly gets the job done.

 

[BadCompany141]

Will never happen, no double damage, no stealth kill animations.

All you can hope for is to creep on someone and sneak in first hit, which can decide whole duel as usually heavy overhead knocks people down and you can finish them.

This is assuming muscle tensing has been added(maybe im crazy, couldn't find the rel notes), so it is not scripted double damage that I meant; when during a fight, your muscles tense up when your about to receive a blow meaning that you could be less hurt depending on the situation of course. therefor outside of a fight where your all relaxed and whatnot your more susceptible to unexpecting blows, dealing even more damage. Take Harry Houdini for example, where a student asked him if he could take blows to the abdomen, he said he could if given time to brace himself, the student punched him four times in the abdomen by surprise resulting in internal organ rupture in which he eventually died of a few weeks later. I think this is fair enough in how stealth kills are considered in close range

 

[zhuliks]

This is assuming muscle tensing has been added(maybe im crazy, couldn't find the rel notes), so it is not scripted double damage that I meant; when during a fight, your muscles tense up when your about to receive a blow meaning that you could be less hurt depending on the situation of course. therefor outside of a fight where your all relaxed and whatnot your more susceptible to unexpecting blows, dealing even more damage. Take Harry Houdini for example, where a student asked him if he could take blows to the abdomen, he said he could if given time to brace himself, the student punched him four times in the abdomen by surprise resulting in internal organ rupture in which he eventually died of a few weeks later. I think this is fair enough in how stealth kills are considered in close range

Drunk people tend to survive falls from high altitudes or in car crashes because their muscles are relaxed and not tense however. Some weapons are like a truck hitting you.

 

[gugand]

No need for special animations. An unaware enemy can be beaten by one hit.

 

[Pc Genie]

Instead of all this nonsense about magic damage boosts, how about just having a simple enough proper stealth system to have enemies not detect you through 360 degree vision?

You can one-hit-kill them by standard means because you have every opportunity to slice/stab/smash/chop/pummel them in the best possible manner.