That nagging feeling

It all started in 2021, July 12th to be exact. I was writing ‘New and reinforced’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/07/12/new-and-reinforced/) and another thought occurred to me. This had the options of an interesting stealth game. Consider the Citadel in Mass Effect, the time is when the Citadel becomes a hub (Mass Effect 3), the bodies are piling up and in that setting we have a stealth game. Consider an engineer, he is creating stealth armour for the Shepard and other spectres at that moment the attacks start. As he was working in a special R&D lab on the station, the humans decided to go off books and create a space in the citadel with no visibility at all. That is the start of the game. Visually it looks very much like the Mass Effect series, but here there are no firefights, a firefight is not something this engineer is equipped for and he is not much of a shot, a mere energy pistol that can deal with rodents and not much more. But stealth, that he can do and he is invisible to the camera’s and scanners, the armour works. 

The lab is below the human embassy it is slightly larger than a room with 5 bedrooms, 3 of them are work related one is a power hub. It is in that setting that he has to find food, make recordings and set up stealth camera’s. In a setting where husks are collecting bodies, where cleaning systems work 24:7, he needs to find places for the camera’s. He has to record what is going on. And unlike the first game, the Embassy section is completely mapped, every room, all views and every item. The player has to download logs, has to avoid and deactivate security systems, even though he seems invisible, he learns that the suit has issues and the points can be gotten to improve the suit, make stealth weapons and collect information. The game expands into other areas later in the game. Larger, not bigger, wider and more challenges. The idea for that setting was that EA could expand on the storylines on the citadel, expand on the races and expand on the locations. The second reason was that there is a lack of good stealth games. After Thief we only got Styx and Aragami, both excellent games. There are other games that have stealth elements, but games driven by stealth are rare on the market and as such this made sense. The idea to have a streaming stealth game was also rewarding in other ways. It would be a first and after the bummer that Andromeda was, taking it into a side street (not a replacement) might make the gamers, the obsessive Mass Effect gamers happy. And consider how large the citadel is, there is plenty of challenges to bring about, especially when you need to make a second and a third location. Consider the problems, or the challenge to create a new space under the noses of those who want to kill you and when we add a little science to it, it could be all kinds of fun. A game based on avoidance and trapping the other party. It could be a blockbuster for EA (they own the Mass Effect IP), just a thought. And consider how many games they released. It is not that they have shown a whole lot of creativity, have they?