DETECTION / SUSPICION METER
A visible gauge showing how close an enemy is to noticing the player — filling as you linger in sightlines, draining as you break contact — with thresholds for suspicion, search, and full alert.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME
- COMMON IN STEALTH · ACTION-ADVENTURE · IMMERSIVE-SIM
Splinter Cell: Blacklist and the modern Assassin's Creed games render it as an arrow-and-fill indicator over enemy heads, Metal Gear Solid V pairs a slow-fill meter with the reflex-time last chance, and Alien: Isolation deliberately hides the meter to keep dread unmeasurable. Designers expose detection as a meter because stealth is unfair without feedback: the player needs to know that crouching in shadow is working, and an analog gauge lets them price risk continuously rather than learning rules by dying. The meter's fill rate becomes the tuning surface for distance, light, movement speed, and cover. Key decisions: per-enemy meters versus a global awareness state, whether partial fills decay fully or leave enemies permanently warier, and whether to show the meter at all — hiding it trades mastery for horror. Pitfall: meters that fill instantly at medium range collapse stealth into trial-and-error; the whole point is the visible in-between where the player can still react.
SEEN IN
- METAL GEAR SOLID V
- SPLINTER CELL: BLACKLIST
- ASSASSIN'S CREED ODYSSEY