Maybe once or twice I managed to get through a mission totally undetected. Sneaking is ... iffy. It feels like all the mechanics are there for it to work, but like a lot of things in this game in needs more finetuning. I can happily sneak around and knock over a pile of whatever and the guards never notice. Sometimes I sneak right past a guard and they will barely notice me, other times it's instant detection even if I just poke my head out. Lots of times I takedown three to four guards on my way to the objective, taking care to hide the bodies, but then I get a body spotted message and everyone is on alert?? There is also a bug or something, where sometimes you brush up against a shelf or something and you get taken out of crouch.
Plus as a major annoyance, it was really stupid to make the crouch key and the skip conversation key the same binding.
lol, I had to rebind the skip convo button. was super annoying. however...you can no longer crouch while in convo. I mean, that's why I used it--I found myself stuck in crouch half the time, entering convo, ffs....anyway.
yeah, just straight up stealth, I find not very functional. The knocking over boxes that don't do anything...the physics is just broke. I tiptoe around a concrete barrier, it shatters. walk into a room stacked to the ceiling with file boxes of papers, they just shred and explode when I walk near them. Cans blast around the alley if you think too hard near them. I mean, there should be some disturbance of items that alert targets, but they don't, because it's actually just broken physics. Now, I think that was the intent, but they realized that the physics were so broken that they turned off the AI from noticing disturbed items (at least, I hope so), so it's just a *current* victim of the current state of triage in this game, when it comes to AI.
but pure sneaking..toss in some hacking seems to be the best, quickest way to make it work for me. get a good cyberdeck and the proper skills, you can just scan the cameras and start remotely shutting down enemies, no death. It's too easy...but at least (system reset, I think), the quickhack skill is RAM and CD expensive, so you can't just spam it everywhere. The upgraded sonic shock hack is really nice, because it basically eliminates (no hear, no communicate, no communicate-
to) for your target for about 1 minute. And it's relatively RAM cheap. So, a couple of quick hacks after scannning the room, you can then run through and/or knock out the remaining targets as you go. Also, overloading objects doesn't really alert anyone else, unless they walk by later and notice an unconsious body. Same with system shutdown--I've basically tranq'd a dude with that, while some other dude is starting at them, and no biggy. writhing on the floor, jamming in his Beats by Dre headphones or whatever.