If you’ve played a third-person action game that lets you sneak around and pick off enemies, like Horizon Zero Dawn, Hitman, or recent Assassin’s Creed games, you’ve likely spent a lot of time crouch-walking through tall grass and then rolling across empty patches of land into, you guessed it, more tall grass. It’s become so common that even games not normally focused on stealth, like Uncharted 4, have included sneaky grass. And after doing it so much, I gotta be honest: I’m just not excited to sneak around in tall grass anymore.
Now, before I go any further, I want to explain what I mean by “Sneaky Grass.” For a very long time, plenty of games have let players obscure their bodies via foliage, grass, or bushes. It was a thing in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in 2004, Far Cry 2 in 2008, and other games before that. But this isn’t sneaky grass. It’s just foliage you can sort of hide in.
Sneaky grass is different. It is often found in patches hand-placed by a level designer to offer paths or options for sneaking around enemies or getting behind them. You’ll often find it around bases or wherever many enemies patrol. When you enter the sneaky grass, the game often changes your character’s stance or highlights them in a different color or perhaps plays a quick sound effect. Or maybe, in the case of Assassin’s Creed games, it does all of the above when you enter the sneaky grass.
The upcoming James Bond game, 007: First Light, looks gorgeous, but in newly released gameplay via a recent preview event, we can see the young Mr. Bond being trained in the ever-so-popular tactic of “hiding in tall grass.” It’s almost laughable how much tall grass is just hanging around the training zone in this gameplay clip. Nobody has a lawnmower?
This is something I notice in a lot of games now, even ones as great as Ghost of Yotei. These massively defended enemy bases are filled with pockets of incredibly tall, thick grass. You’d think the guards and people in charge would maybe opt to cut some of this stuff down so, you know, people couldn’t hide in it. Because of how popular tall grass has become in games, so many enemy bases I infiltrate these days seem to have fired their landscaping teams. It gets downright silly when you stop and notice all this sneaky grass.
A history of sneaky grass
So, where did this all start? I think Assassin’s Creed III is the progenitor of all the modern sneaky grass we find in so many games today. Again, it didn’t invent “hiding in bushes,” but due to the devs’ commitment to social stealth at the time, AC3 devs had to get creative to offer a new way to sneak.
As explained in an Assassin’s Creed Reddit AMA from nearly 14 years ago, back then, the primary type of stealth in the franchise was “social stealth,” like hiding in crowds and blending in to a group sitting on a bench and so on. And simply crouching, apparently, didn’t fit that style of gameplay.
Here’s what ACIII’s lead game designer, Steven Masters, said on Reddit when asked about a crouch button:
This is an interesting one… our stealth is primarily “social stealth”, and we’ve been debating having a crouch button since pretty much day 1. It was always the vision that crouching in public spaces is not ‘hiding in plain sight’ – if anything you’re calling attention to yourself. We found that the ‘stalking zones’ – the low vegitation where you can crouch down while low profile – are a good compromise since it allows you to crouch but only in circumstances that make sense.
It also had the added bonus of making the act of sneaking about a place more active, letting players keep flowing forward even while being careful and sneaky. I remember thinking, the first time I slipped into tall grass in AC3, how clever this felt. As long as you stayed in the grass, you were safe and couldn’t be seen. And while Assassin’s Creed III was a divisive game at the time, this “sneaky grass” technique seemed to catch on over the next few years, with games like 2014’s Shadow of Mordor including their own spin on sneaky grass. Ironically, around this time is when Ubisoft began adding crouch buttons into Assassin’s Creed games. The devs also kept sneaky grass, though.
Sneaky grass would later pop up in plenty of other games, including perhaps the weirdest of all, Uncharted 4. Something about it being in this game stood out to younger Zack a decade ago in 2016. And in the decade since, sneaky grass has just become a given part of many games’ stealth toolbox. So much so that I’m getting bored with it. Even in games I really like, such as last year’s Ghost of Yotei, sneaky grass just feels so overused and makes most stealth encounters play out similarly across many games.
I get why sneaky grass has caught on in video games. It’s fun to zip through a big patch of tall grass, take out an enemy, and continue moving quickly to the next target.
But seeing the foliage pop up in 007: First Light was disappointing. I remember seeing it and going “oh… dang.” Sure, IOI’s past Hitman games used sneaky grass, but I wanted something different for James Bond. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would hide in the grass. He’d do something cool. Use a gadget. Think fast. Talk his way through a situation. I want levels and missions to be built around those moments. And it sounds like there will be some of that. But seeing that sneaky grass pop up in the tutorial made it clear that I’ll also be rolling between rocks and grass at times, as I’ve done in so many other games. What a shame. It could be fun, but I’m not very excited about it.
