Why is stealth hated?

[Polyblob]

Everyone i've spoken to seems to have a hatred for stealth missions in this game. Is it across the playerbase that this feeling resounds?

[ineedbettername]

It can be aggravating when a heist is going perfectly and then a guard that you lost track of walks around a corner, ruining your run because you've already used all four pagers.

When stealth goes right though, it's incredibly satisfying.

[Doktor Vic Tim]

Restarts and some desynch. Some heists can be so close to completion and if you muck up stealth you can be in super big trouble and unable to handle loud. FF Day 3 is notorious for this.

Stealth can also be really REALLY slow and boring.

[Дегтярьов]

Stealth is fine, just dont do it with pubs.

[Mojo Forever]

Much easier to screw up than going loud and I personally don't find stealth to be anywhere near as replayable as doing a heist loud.

[Z3r0_]

I think the biggest reason is that it's clunky. Payday 2's stealth mechanics, unlike loud gameplay, has remained virtually untouched since the game's release, barring a couple of bug fixes here and there. It can also be tedious, which isn't helped by higher difficulties (ESPECIALLY on newer maps) going out of their way to make things even more tedious for the sole purpose of keeping people from rushing the heist with ECMs (imho, a good stealth heist should make people WANT to play it properly, not force them into it).

There's also the map design, which I think is the main reason why stealth can be problematic in this game. A good stealth heist allows you to, with some cleverness and good timing, avoid ever coming across a guard at all, rather than forcing you into killing them, and ideally shouldn't double-up on each other all the time (I'm looking at YOU Breakin' Feds and Framing Frame, both of which embody just about everything wrong with stealth gameplay in Payday 2, but I digress). A good stealth heist also tends to keep things simple and straight-forward, rather than convoluted and overly complicated (the only heist that largely gets a pass on this is Golden Grin Casino, which is supposed to parody the Ocean's Eleven remake and that particular type of heist film in general).

Lastly...stealth gameplay in Payday 2 often means a whole lot of waiting (don't know what I mean? Play Murky Station on DSOD solo, you'll learn to HATE those camera drones really quickly), and that can get really boring. Also, if you ♥♥♥♥ up? You're starting over from the beginning most of the time, because most stealth builds have almost no combat capability at all; you can get away with going loud anyway on some of the lower difficulties, especially if you're running Hacker, but above Very Hard you're REALLY pushing your luck in most cases (unless you've gone out of your way to make a stealth-loud hybrid build - yes, those are a thing, you see them in Crime Spree sometimes). On the other hand, in loud gameplay you can often salvage the situation when things go wrong. This combined with the aforementioned tedium makes stealth VERY slow, especially if you're trying to quickly grind for infamy, where it's usually faster to just speedrun loud heists, do Cook Off/Border Crystals for a couple of hours, or just play Crime Spree.

Oh, and then there's the "stealth-but-not-really" heists, which are a completely different category. This category includes Counterfeit, No Mercy, Engine Trouble (Big Oil Day 2), and Car Shop. Counterfeit and No Mercy don't really count because all stealth does is make the cops show up later into the heist, letting you complete a couple of objectives without getting shot at (and it's the LOUD part of No Mercy that tends to be the problem with that one), Engine Trouble's kinda a ♥♥♥♥ move if you're playing it for the first time and aren't expecting to have to pivot to loud gameplay (and didn't select a build for it)...and then there's Car Shop, which I'm almost certain was designed from the ground up to be a loud heist but was changed to stealth at the last minute because people were complaining about there not being enough stealth heists in the game. Technically Breakin' Feds fits into this category too as one of the random escapes you can get involves setting out explosives in the basement, alerting everyone in the building...which defeats the whole purpose of bothering with stealth up to that point in the first place, as the whole in-universe justification for it was because Locke wanted to ♥♥♥♥ with Commissioner Garret under his nose (clearly somebody at Overkill didn't think this one through).

[patrick888]

Originally posted by Polyblob:

Everyone i've spoken to seems to have a hatred for stealth missions in this game. Is it across the playerbase that this feeling resounds?

i prefer loud because its more engaging and fun overall but i like stealth for variety

[Arthur von Tule]

It's not like I hate it, I just prefer loud. And after playing lot of loud, stealth is a noice change though.

[Lar Dass]

Only diamind store and jewelry store stealth is the best to do and easiest. 3 or 4 guards, kill every civ loot and escape

[Snivy]

Stealth is the most latency dependant.
And if I know one thing, than it's every player hates losing a game due lag.

[Chepu]

I don't hate stealth, but I hate Breakin' Feds

[Tiretracker]

My problem with stealth is PD2's janky AI. More than one occasion I've had my hostages discovered clear across the map through a dozen walls, and thats just one example.

[i c wiener]

PD2 was never designed for anything other than control stealth. The mechanics do not properly support any heist that involves sneaking around and avoiding multiple enemies and NPCs, eg there is no reliable way to distract guards that works on every map. Ultimately it's usually slow and intensely boring, and a single stroke of bad luck can ruin an otherwise smooth run.

[Kuiper]

...stealth is hated?

[Kuiper]

Originally posted by A Deep Commitment To Konata:

My problem with stealth is PD2's janky AI. More than one occasion I've had my hostages discovered clear across the map through a dozen walls, and thats just one example.

That's what happens wheen you make an FPS in a racing engine.

[XanDer-XTX]

Stealth is not hated, the mechanics are just fine -- guards pathing, pagers, detection risk, cameras, ecms. Anything relatable with this in-game dynamism does its role effectively.

Thing is, there are heist that happens to be bad, even when they are stealth only. I'm talking about The Yacht Heist or Breakin' Feds, where guards can be unpredictable, hell! spamming mines does not always guarantee a safe run and the lack of cover is tacky.

Shadow Raid and Murky Station are how a truly stealth heist should look like. The way the map is built, the design, the atmosphere, etc.