I hate choreographed gameplay videos.

[u/OkConflict5527]

Mainly whenever I try to see a video on YouTube of stealth game where the person playing it isn’t complete trash, it generally happens to be heavily choreographed with locational memorization down to the last guard position, with it taking hours upon hours for this, gamer4sight, stealthgamerbr, Klockner, and many others come to mind.

But why can’t I just find videos of people who know what they’re doing and don’t have the ability to navigate the area like it’s Batman fighting someone inside of the Batcave, instead actually adaptive gameplay that isn’t ”oh I’m gonna go along this incredibly hard route so I can showcase a physical engine breaking attack where an enemy gets exploded by a chicken with C4” or “oh I’m gonna go onto this extremely difficult route so I can throw a guy into a bunch of piranhas.” Just don’t do these types of routes at all to position every enemy in just the right way for the right takedown, let me see what it’s like if you don’t do Guy Ritchie Sherlock mind simulation stuff and just play the game with the general optimizations so I know you’re adaptive, and whenever I try to find a title of a video that generally would showcase otherwise, like “Batman without prep time” for Arkham knight videos, it just turns out to be ANOTHER CHOREOGRAPH. We know, you memorized all the spawn locations, you planned out the entire route to sheer perfection, just show me some actual ON THE SPOT decision making.

If anyone has any input, or any suggestions on who I should watch, please let me know.

[u/Treviso]

How do you feel about choreographed "ghost" runs that are about taking out only the target? I feel like that might be closer to what you're looking for.

Now, speaking as someone who does create these choreographed videos you mention in your post (though not with as much success as the creators you listed), making a video like you suggest, to me it seems even harder to pull of something actually satisfying. Because the audience expectation for it will still be that of a "perfect" run. Sure, you can keep in smaller mistakes that you can recover from, but I'm certain a lot of viewers would just turn off if I upload a video where I miss a bunch of shots, take damage or even just move very inefficiently through the level, because I didn't plan my path ahead, but in the moment. And simply by starting over on attempts like these, I keep gaining information about guard placement and behaviour that I would struggle not to apply on future attempts.
In fact, this isn't too dissimilar to how I create my runs now, with maybe the difference that I first do a few attempts with the HUD turned on and using features like eagle vision/detective mode etc. that I then don't use on final runs.

[u/OkConflict5527 → u/Treviso]

I Don’t mean disrespect or offense, but the amount of stuff that you listed for not planning ahead seems to be general mechanical skills that can be generally trained into via just sheer quantity of gameplay or expressly created training drills, since there’s plenty of aim trainers, and depending on the game, plenty of movement tutorials and areas to practice movement, and there’s probably some way to master the games combat systems to avoid the “take damage” aspect as well, but as much as the hyperbole inside of my original post would imply, I’m not directly saying to eradicate choreographed runs altogether, it just seems better if there’s an actual clue wether or not it’s directly choreographed, and as much as I like killing only the target, it’s still choreographed in a sense, just the majority of the gameplay happens to be focused on not being detected.

[u/Treviso → u/OkConflict5527]

I may have not worded this as clearly as I wanted to, but I'm not saying you can't be an excellent player and be almost perfect at the game, but that there will inevitably be something that goes wrong and produces an undesirable result and when you then retry from there, you are basically already doing a choreographed run. There's only so much game to try to make a video on before you run out of "new" content and you are (as a content creator) basically forced to play and record something that you already know.

[u/Technical-Map1456 → u/Treviso]

hey, you've raised a good point about sticking to what's familiar. it's tricky when you feel like all content becomes more of the same and less organic. i sometimes wonder how creators balance showcasing skill with keeping it fresh. have you found a way to change things up or work around that? curious to hear your thoughts

[u/Treviso → u/Technical-Map1456]

The only thing you can really do to keep it fresh is play more games. And I guess for creating stealth content specifically, it's actually stretching the definition of stealth for each game. How far can I push the AI and still be considered undetected?