![mark of the ninja mark of the ninja](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/markoftheninja/images/d/df/Ora_wide1.jpg)
We could figure out what's working and what's not. Not exactly the sort of unseen ninja Anderson had imagined.īut, once the team doubled down on making Mark of the Ninja a core stealth game, Anderson said they could "see things lifting from the trough. The result was that playtesters would just run through the levels, beating up everyone they came across. So we need to have more stuff that's not sneaking! Like, 'Let's add a more robust combat system and more direct combat with the enemies.' That was totally the wrong thing to do." "When things weren't working, we didn't totally understand why. You have to have all of those components more or less working."īefore everything was working, though, the team began to have doubts about sticking to its stealth ideals and started to experiment elsewhere.
![mark of the ninja mark of the ninja](https://judgementwithalan.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/mark-of-the-ninja-3.jpg)
If you're not able to know whether you'll be able to be perceived by an enemy because you can't tell if you're in darkness or not, the game is basically unplayable. "But if the AI in a stealth game behave consistently? The game is basically unplayable. "In any other action game, if a character's flanking behavior isn't working, it's pretty easy to imagine through what it'd be like when it's good," explained Anderson.
![mark of the ninja mark of the ninja](https://www.gry-online.pl/i/h/1/406155796.jpg)
They explained that, unlike other genres, in stealth games, everything has to be working before the game starts to feel good. Anderson pointed to a postmortem done by the Thief team wherein they mentioned that the game wasn't feeling right until just a few months before launch. Much of the trouble was with stealth games in general. "We had a lot to figure out and the bits weren't fitting together." "There was definitely a point of time where we were not sure if the game was ever going to be good or if Microsoft would pull the plug," said Anderson.
![mark of the ninja mark of the ninja](https://images.gog-statics.com/79d512ab1f2552e2c6479b65d656fad82aec6f8e24a177214aff9aa8bff803c2.jpg)
So how do you get around that? The team struggled to make it work. But in 2D, there are no corners to hide around. Anderson gave the example of the classic stealth gameplay moment where a guard is walking down a hallway and you are hiding around the corner. You can't just port the notion straight across," he said.īringing a stealth game into side-scrolling 2D, and not the top-down 2D of the original Metal Gear games, is far trickier than it first might seem. "The design process involved looking at 3D stealth games, figuring out why they worked the way they did, and then deconstructing that and finding a way to translate it back down into 2D. Anderson wanted to recreate that same feeling. Despite the setting, the core gameplay tenets were all about the power of being unseen. In place of a ninja, Thief starred Garret, a lock-picking ne'er-do-well in the Middle Ages.
#Mark of the ninja series
While there is a surprising lack of truly stealthy ninja games, there are plenty of core stealth games that don't star ninjas.Īnderson's inspiration was Thief, the classic first-person stealth series originally created by Looking Glass Studios. So I was like, 'Fuck it, let's just do that.'" But, for some reason that never really happened in games. "If you want to make a stealth game, you don't want to vomit out some long, complicated exposition like, 'Oh, you're commandos with psychic power, blah blah blah.' You just want to say, 'You're a ninja.' It feels like it should calibrate people's expectations appropriately, being stealthy and all that. Ninjas are trained not to be seen, so why do most ninja games involve creating as much chaos as possible? It wasn't a denigration of those games as much as a level of surprise. But, in games, aside from Tenchu, anything with a ninja is just, 'Fucking murder all the dudes, blood, gore, cutting helicopters with giant swords.'" "The ninja as a fictional pop-culture construct affords things like being sneaky and undetected and agile and fast. "That's kind of weird," the lead designer of Mark of the Ninja explained in an interview with Polygon. Nels Anderson did not want another Ninja Gaiden.