What exactly happened to the stealth genre? Why did it die? Could it ever come back?

Patience is dead. Doing anything with a gun besides running around like a maniac and mashing the autoaim button is dead. Getting punished for being stupid is dead. Gathering intelligence, reading documents, listening to in game conversations is dead. Predicting your enemy's location without a GPS and/or x-ray vision is dead. Managing resources instead of spraying bullets like I spray piss after 5 beers is dead.

>SC: Blacklist
>Echelon gets a meme plane base instead of a basement floor of The Building
>Upgrades tutorial
>Can't proceed in the campaign without unlocking enemy-tracking automap
>Automap can't be disabled once unlocked
Some kind of a miracle allowed me to skip that step the very first and only time I ever played through that game.

Everything does that enemy tracking/x-ray thing nowadays

And all the wrong games try to develop proper sound systems, for no gameplay-related reasons
youtu.be/MZ_bUW8thp4

Stealth is not a popular genre, so it can't become a popular genre: publishers mostly fund games that mimick popular games, because these games make money, and they want money. Mimicking success is a very safe investment, so they go all out on it. Just look at the console FPS trend, the DotA trend, the more recent Overwatch-clone trend and Battle Royale trend. Gameplay-wise, they brought nothing new, it's stuff that could have been done 20 years ago, that has been tried 20 years ago, but it just happened to work at some point. It's a trend.

Few publishers dare break the rules and experiment with new genres, taking huge financial risks in the process. Few of these experimental games become popular, even fewer become trendy enough for other publishers to start mass cloning it. Stealth isn't quite trendy. Hell, the Souls series had many publishers ask themselves questions, because why on earth would obscure, glitchy, ugly, frustratingly difficult, and borderline unfinished games ever fucking sell? We have yet to see a big budget Souls clone from a major publisher, and we probably never will.

We would need a HUGELY POPULAR stealth game made by a big studio to possibly start a trend. But while we need a studio to dare, we need a market to buy it. But most gamers these days are fucking retards, they want quick action, they can't think, they have no patience. Actually the Souls series tell us a lot about that, because the games aren't hard, they just require the player to take his time, not rush things, not be overly confident, just progress step by step. Modern gamers don't have the patience for that, they don't have the patience to wait in a dark corner for an opening without going guns blazing. Stealth is mostly relegated to a sub segment of action games, like Assassin's Creed games show.

Meanwhile, we've seen Dishonored and Nu Hitman these past few years. Popular, successfull, but no cigar.

My older brother was rubbish at FPS games, but he loved to go bang bang and watch people die. He cried and bitched at any challenge, and just wanted to "play" them for seeing the loud flashes and stuff.

We got to Neotokyo in Timesplitters 2 and he had a fit because the level required stealth. I adored that level. Eventually he begged me to complete the level for him. He had decided that stealth was "cool" and he wanted to be a badass ninja, but just like being a big gun blam blam man he wanted the game to do it for him and basically be a cutscene emulator.

I told him that we'd playthrough on co-op, and that if he paid attention, listened carefully and got good at what I was doing, he could make it through easily. We tried about 20 times and eventually I told him to just play a different game. Guy has some sort of terminal inability to observe, think carefully and improve.

Some years later after we're both late teen-early twenties out of school, my brother is raving about this great game he's got. Batman: Arkham Asylum. He takes about how cinematic and wonderful it is, and how it lets him be a stealthy badass. I sit and watch it with him; the voice acting is nice and all, but it's nothing that you couldn't experience more directly and fullsomely from watching a BM:TAS episode. (which I do regularly.)

We get to the gameplay. The "stealth". It's basically "approach the Stealth point and press X to Stealth". Once you're in the Stealth point and in Stealth mode, you can Stealth freely with Stealth actions to Stealthdefeat your opponents.

This is not stealth. This is barely even tactical gameplay. Outside of the stealth bits, aka enemies have guns, Batman can mash buttons to floor crowds of enemies. There's room for more skill, but it doesn't matter. Blam blam kickass. Sounds a bit like Bing bing wahoo to me. But I digress.

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My older brother's attitude towards gameplay is commonplace, and its that level of "player" taking an interest in being a X-badass that leads to the degradation of X in gaming, whatever X may be.

much like RPG mechanics stealth mechanics were added to mainstream action games (and former stealth series like Splinter Cell were turned into action games) which turned pure stealth into a niche too small to support its own major titles. so now only indie shit is left in the niche.

Hail to the king baby

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Stealth was hardly anything other than niche.
And devs apparently are unable to understand that good sound design is paramount for those games. Which makes any kind of usual stealth gameplay nowadays into a limited version of what it could be.
Also, obsession with graphics lead to skimping on anything else in most games.

It's too difficult for casuals and too difficult to monetize with lootboxes, microtransactions, socialization, and daily challenges. If a new Splinter Cell game is being made then it WILL be open world and have tiered loot. It'll be Splinter Cell: Destiny Edition where stealth is an 'option' while violence is a more attractive option. I liked Splinter Cell Conviction and Blacklist because they cut out a lot of chuff but if you've ever played co-op in those games with randoms you see just how utterly shit most people are at stealthing.

I remember doing co-op in Conviction. My teammate would blow the insta-fail pure stealth beginning of the Embassy mission 99% of the time.

>Meanwhile, we've seen Dishonored and Nu Hitman these past few years. Popular, successfull, but no cigar.
Eh, I played Dishonered 1 with a 0 kills, 0 detections (though several knockouts when neccessary) playthrough and the only magic I used was the teleport one. It was quite fun, actually, though getting past those assassins, escpacially the boss, without getting detected actually made me save-scum a bit, IIRC, but it was just that one moment that was a bit more challenging. It was fairly easy overall, but still plenty of fun.

Recently I have been playing the Hitman series from the first one up to absolution (from a 10$ or so steam sale a longer while ago) and damn that first one with no saving within a level was damn annoying. I didn't give too much of a shit about my score there since fucking up once near the end of the mission forces one to start all over again and the patience for that is fairly limited. Limited saves for the following ones were fine though, prevents me from paranoia-based save-scumming and make it more enjoyable overall, since it fairly exiting when you have to conserve your saves, escpacially if you aren't sure how much longer the mission will take and how many tricky situation would yet come up.

Codename 47 was made entirely obsolete with Contracts. Everything that isn't included as a remade and improved version in Contracts is so shit in C47 that it isn't worth trying.

>mfw have a xbone x
>mfw this e3 all splinter cell games were announced as BC
>mfw already had SC1

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There's so many great hybrid stealth/action games out there I have no damn clue why you babies still whine that not every one of those aren't MUH PURE stealth like Styx and Hitman are- oh wait those are games from this game, oops.

Personally I liked Alpha Protocol, since I only made stealth playthroughs where I min-maxed on pistol and stealth, mostly. I didn't feel like even attempting a loud, violent approach in this game.

Stealth is a niche genre. Good stealth is hard to design (compared to decent shooter combat). Making bigger budget stealth games is a death sentence.
Companies that want big AAA games that sell well will avoid stealth games (or try to casualize them/make it so you can just blast your way through).

People whine because of the fact that great stealth franchises have been murdered and stomped into the ground. Styx and Hitman are great. Styx, Hitman, Thief and Splinter Cell would be double great.