“In terms of stealth action we’ve always wrestled with how do we stay fresh,” says Redding. “How do we evolve it and keep it something that mainstream players are interested in”.

Interestingly part of that evolution involves the unusual admittance that, “Stealth is not a nice thing”. Redding explains: “The majority of people know there’s a manageable period of time in which they’re either going to have to be patient or undetected or careful. It’s how you segment the action. You want to keep that loop, you don’t want that loop to run for half an hour or an hour, you want it to run for 5 or 10 minutes at a time to allow players to move into the next area and engage in some exploration. Games like Hitman, Dishonored and the Batman Arkham games are a good reflection of that approach and so we took those lessons to heart”.

Part of perfecting that loop is also getting the balance right. “What players don’t like is arbitrary or unfair failure,” Redding points out. “Nobody wants to feel like they’ve blundered. What you want to feel like is that you arrive in a situation and you can see why it’s challenging, where the threats are, and where you can take a calculated risk to get through a certain area”.

To achieve this a game needs an amount of robustness says Redding. “What you’ve got to avoid is situations that are so fragile that the player feels like, one misstep, and some unexpected thing is going to cause them to be detected or killed. There may be a small set of masochistic players who like that, and I count myself among that group, [but] we have to be careful that the majority of players feel they have at least a fighting chance and they understand why they fail when they fail. That’s why we offer four different difficulty levels. Normal and Rookie and Realistic have a healthy spectrum from pretty easy to quite difficult.

And on top of that we have this masochistic mode for absolute perfectionists. If you know about ghost playing and you never want to touch anybody [or] leave a fingerprint, this is for you”.