Let me try and explain. Deus Ex or Splinter Cell, only have to focus on one thing. Each level, handcrafted, tested, and the various outcomes. They can fine tune things like guard movements and rotations so they can work out where the player can find gaps in security to reach a new part of a level.
Now look at EDO. a whole galaxy of possible "levels". They can't handcraft these missions to be like a single player game sucg as splinter cell. Hence why it has a more generic stealth system, which i don't actually get what your problem is. It works pretty much the same as most stealth systems in most stealth based games or games that feature stealth. I mean you crouch, your steps are quiet. You walk, your steps a re a bit louder. You run, your steps are loud.
This is an utter farce.
EDO's settlements are about as cookie cutter as it gets, often smaller, frequently less interactive, with fewer possibilities than what exist in many other games. Not that this is particularly relevant to my points here. I can fire up the level editors for some games make something that doesn't look like anything that was ever in the original game and drop in generic NPCs that interact with those levels better than NPCs do with EDO settlements.
My big problem with stealth is a fundamental problem with how NPC AI behaves, which is wrong for a dynamic level, for a handcrafted level, for a empty plain in the middle of nowhere. There are plenty of mechanical absurdities beyond that, but the overriding issue is NPCs behaving like they are trying to give me a tour of bad stealth mechanisms, rather than NPCs that feel like they are trying to do justice to their jobs and maybe live to see another day.
I mean, you want to do splits jumps in corridors and watch guards walk underneath you like Sam Fisher? You want to crawl through some air vents? Both even less realistic or plausible than what EDO provides.
Not sure where you think I even came close to implying any of that.
I want NPC AI that doesn't ignore glowing balls of plasma, languid tracers, or inexplicably visible burst of laser fire, that wiz through their FoV; new holes and scorch marks that appear on walls they've walked past a thousand times; missing access panels, random garbage strewn about, random ships parked just outside their property lines; or countless other cues that something is very wrong and that they should probably stop marching around like zombies before they all die.
I want NPC AI that reacts more plausibly to missing comrades. Stumbling across a bullet laden corpse and doing a cursory 90 second search of the immediate 10 meter vicinity before resuming the exact same patrol as before without even adapting it to replace the holes in the perimeter due to some of them being dead is silly no matter which way you cut it. They should conduct a plausible search, be able to infer likely directions of attacks, and move to secure likely targets. And they should remain on high alert.
I want NPC AI that remain in frequent radio contact with eachother, so that they don't need to stumble upon a corpse to still not realize that something is really wrong.
I want NPC AI that know to turn off their damned flashlights when they start to take fire, or suspect they may have a sniper about.
I want NPC AI that can use their own settlement controls.
I want NPC AI that can see as far as I can see, shoot as far as I can shoot, and dodge what I can dodge. Almost every time I fire a rocket, I hit at least one NPC. Almost every time a rocket or plasma shot is fired at my CMDR by an NPC from more than farting distance, he sits down for tea, reads the paper, checks his watch, then gets up and pushes his chair in before side stepping said projectile and firing a return shot.
I want NPCs that know when to cut their losses, power down a settlement, grab what they can carry, and call for an extraction.
And a hundred other things that really should not be difficult to do, because right now, NPCs feel like they were all placed specifically to die at the hands of my CMDR, which apparently they were, but that's no excuse for it to be so obvious, as it really ruins the illusion.
Another issue you have is being a nitpicker of the highest order. Let me just clue you in, that this is not a good trait for someone that likes video games.
I vehemently disagree. I lets me rule out a massive number of crappy games, or to recognize low hanging fruit I could use to improve the ones I can improve.
I mean you are talking about how realistic an engineers plasma rifle would be 2000 years in the future.......let that sink in.
No, I'm complaining that in the setting, both depicted and suggested, that plasma rifle makes no sense contextually. It doesn't fit, and it the resulting gameplay suffers.
Stop trying to infer things you could not possibly infer and don't tell me what I should or should not like.
Some things aren't going to add up because then the balance would be off somewhere, and somewhere in the galaxy, someone else will be complaining like its the biggest drama in the world.
Verisimilitude is not the enemy of balance--indeed, I'd argue that it almost always reinforces balance--but even if it were, I'd value it a lot more than balance, because I feel it makes for better games, irrespective of the genre, no matter the degree of fantasy involved.
