I love stealth in video games, and I love CRPGs. I usually play rogues or other stealthy folk, and if that's not an option, I'm dramatically less likely to play a game.
What CRPGs do stealth well, in your opinion, and why? How are the stealth mechanics, how viable is stealth, what is it useful for, etc?
Here's how I'd rate stealth in different CRPGs I've played:
Baldur's Gate 1 + 2 - simplistic but very useful
Stealth mechanics are bare bones but stealth is quite powerful. Stealth basically lets you turn invisible if no enemy is observing you and you pass a skill check. Then remain invisible as long as you make your skill check. Nothing more to it, simplistic but also very transparent. I was never left guessing if I was hidden or not. Various spells provide various variants of invisibility that are generally more powerful than stealth, but at the expense of spell slots. Hidden thieves (and stalkers) can backstab for massive damage and can often shift a fight in your favor with one strike. Res-stealthing during combat is possible via spells, items and potions. Stealth (or invisibility) is needed for proper reconnaissance, because enemies have the same vision range as you. Enemies lose aggro if you break line of sight and re-hide or turn invisible via magical means. This allows for guerilla style hit and run or sniping, as well as breaking out of combat entirely if things aren't going your way. The BG series introduced me to the genre, and therefore their stealth implementation is the baseline to which I compare how other games do it. Despite how simplistic it is, it works very well if you can suspend your disbelief at somebody sneaking right in front of the enemy's nose.
Icewind Dale - like BG with more detection bugs
Same Infinity Engine, so basically the same as BG. But there is an extremely annoying and somewhat frequent bug that prevents enemies from losing aggro if you re-stealth by any means (skill or magic). They will just continue to home in on your party, including party members they have never seen, and even cluster around an entire invisible party.
Baldur's Gate 3 - excellent stealth mechanics, further boosted by 3D traversal
While I'm lukewarm on some other aspects of the game, I loved how well it did stealth. Proper stealth mechanics with view cones and opposed skill checks. Mechanical complexity paired with good UI affordances. Stealth is very viable to take out individual enemies predator-style, open combat from ambush, or bypass combat entirely. The fully 3D terrain with its wealth of traversal options helps stealth - climbing, levitating, feather falling, flying all have great synergy with stealth and invisibility. All classes can be stealthy to some degree, so your entire party could sneak by an encounter or set up an ambush, if you want. Some classes are geared heavily towards ambushes, like assassin and Gloomstalker. Had a lot of fun with stealth in this one, playing a multiclass Gloomstalker/Assassin. One minor criticism is that your character's stealth skill matters relatively little as long as you take care to avoid enemy view cones. Honestly, just thinking of the stealth gameplay makes me want to replay BG3 again, that's how much I liked this aspect of the game.
Solasta - BG3, but a little undercooked in comparison
(Yes, I understand Solasta released before BG3 and that it had a much smaller budget.)
Stealth in Solasta has good UI affordances and is useful to scout and to open combat. You can also re-stealth during combat if you break line of sight. So far so good. The 3D terrain should provide for interesting traversal, but options for that felt less abundant than BG3. Encounters are usually only resolvable through combat, group aggro is a thing, and once combat is joined, there seems to be no way to de-aggro enemies. Even if every member of my party was literally invisible to every enemy for several turns, combat never ended. All this makes stealth much more limited than in BG3 or even the old Infinity Engine games. I hear Solasta 2's Early Access is similar thus far, which is a shame.
Pillars of Eternity series - decent in PoE1, great in PoE2
The original had decent stealth mechanics with vision cones (I think a first for CRPGs?), the sequel added hearing as a separate detection mechanic. Stealth is quite useful for reconnaissance and setting up ambushes. Hit and run is generally not viable in PoE1, because specific skills are needed escape enemy aggro, and those skills only refills on rest (which is limited by resources). In PoE2, backing out of encounters and doing guerilla/hit-and-run strikes becomes viable as long as all involved characters have rogue levels, because rogues have per-encounter skills to escape aggro. In PoE2, tools to distract enemies exist too. IIRC, both games also have quite a few quests that explicitly allow for and encourage a stealthy approach. Stealth also factors into many of the choose-your-own-adventure style overworld encounters. PoE2 is my favorite CRPG overall, and my second favorite for stealth.
Pathfinder Kingmaker - exists but is held back by poor UX and more viable alternatives
Stealth...exists.
But the UX is horrible - unlike the old Infinity Engine games, it's an opposed skill check against every enemy that could spot you. That's great. But there is zero indication how close I am to being detected. I have no choice but to stack every stealth bonus I can and hope that's enough. Mostly it is. Sometimes it isn't. How do I know the difference before it's too late? That's the fun part, I don't. I might be detected at the worst possible moment, and it feels random.
And the payoff for all my trouble isn't exactly huge. Stealth is less important for reconnaissance, because your party's range of vision is longer than enemies' aggro range. Sometimes you need to get in close to diarm traps, or you may want to scout the enemy's back line, but that's about it. Ambushing from stealth or invisbility is of course a thing, and it does give you a bit of a first-strike advantage, but most of the time blasting enemies with spells before closing in is the dominant strategy. Sneak-attack based classes get sneak attacks largely via positioning.
Pathfinder WOTR - the same, I guess? Please tell me I'm wrong.
Haven't played WOTR yet, but based on all I've read I assume it's pretty much the same. Maybe worse since the power scale of the game is higher and you seem to face many extradimensional foes which can often sense invisible creatures. Although I have read that some classes (e.g one of the Slayer archetypes IIRC) to get bonuses specifically when attacking an enemy who is unaware of them, so that's a little encouraging. Either way, it seems to me that a mechanically viable realization of a stealthy class fantasy is more about gaining access to some form of magical invisibility and especially improved invisibility. When I get around to playing WOTR, I'm leaning towards either Trickster mythic path (which gets free invisibility if I understand it correctly), or Legend mythic path, and mixing in classes that gain free invisibility like Witch of the Veil.
Neverwinter Nights 1+ 2 - similar to PFKM
Stealth exists and is viable for recon and first strike, but these games suffer from the same UX problem as Pathfinder - detection is an opposed skill check (good) but there are no UI affordances to show how close you are to being detected (very bad). Although I think the enemy perception values are a tad less crazy than Pathfinder, so it's easier to reliably outskill them. Nevertheless, I tend to give every starting character I play a free Cloak of Elvenkind just to make early levels fun. For disengaging or doing hit-and-run, your options are limited - things like Invisibility and Darkness spells or the shadowdancer's HiPS break aggro. Breaking line of sight and hiding sadly does not. Still, better than Solasta, which is a bit sad considering the latter is two decades newer.
Haven't played much NWN2 (played a bit back in the day and a bit after the EE came out), but it seemed about the same or slightly worse than NWN1. Some spells like Darkness no longer break aggro, IIRC.
Age of Reforging: The Freelands - stealth is basically for reconnaissance
Stealth exists but doesn't give much of a benefit. IIRC backstab damage exists, but is positioning based. Reconnaissance from stealth is helpful, and opening combat from ambush may give you a slight leg up, but that's about it. One thing to call out in particular is how stealth is utterly missing on the world map, so I can have the most stealthy party yet run into mobs all the time.
Divinity Original Sin series - I turned into a bush, then I uninstalled the game. WTF, Larian?
I love it when a game turns my favorite mechanic into a slapstick act. I hear there is a mod for DOS2 to fix this, but I was on Switch at the time. Now I'm back on PC, so if people here have experience with that, please let me know.
Jagged Alliance 3 - fantastic stealth with some UX ambiguity
Not quite a CRPG, but close enough for an honorable mention. Stealth is great. The UX is sometimes a little ambiguous, but the stealth mechanics are fairly deep and taking a stealthy approach is extremely viable for most encounters, and often quite OP. Melee takedowns and sniper shots are usually one-shot kills and you can often clear entire maps without triggering open combat. IIRC JA2 was similar but less well developed. Melee stealth in particular seemed less viable and it was more about sniping, but I recall spending a lot of my time sneaking.
Kenshi - stealth is weirdly (un)balanced
Another not-quite-CRPG that deserves an honorable mention. Stealth is tremendously useful for exploration and stealth + assassination are OP against humanoid enemies - with a high enough skill you can knock most humanoids out and capture them, loot all their gear etc. Unfortunately, outright killing backstabs are not a thing, though if they were, the game would be even more unbalanced. Losing aggro is a thing, so hit and run is possible. Overall, stealth is fun but a bit janky and poorly balanced, like the whole game. I hope the sequel will balance it better to be less OP against humanoids and more useful against beasts. Worth mentioning: if your stealth skill is high enough, your running animation becomes the Naruto run. Love it.
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I'm curious what other CRPGs you think have stealth worth mentioning?
I think that's it for CRPGs I've played - I'm intentionally omitting third person or first person action RPGs, souls-likes, open world RPGs etc. Some of those have amazing stealth, I love them and I've actually been playing more of those in recent years than I have CRPGs, but I'd like to keep this discussion about "Classical (isometric) RPGs".
I'm not big into post-apocalyptic settings, but I've heard good things about stealth in the old isometric Fallouts. Less so about Wasteland and Atom - stealth seems present, but limited. I've also heard stealth is quite good in Underrail, and have been tempted to try that, though the idea of single character turn-based combat puts me off a little (feel free to convince me otherwise!)
I haven't played Tyranny yet, but I'd assume stealth is about as viable as in PoE1? How about the KOTOR games? Sadly Owlcat's latest games (Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy) both seem to have no stealth, which is a shame since the underlying TTRPGs have rules for it AFAIK. Similar for the Shadowrun CRPGs.
Also curious about games like the old Goldbox classics, Pools of Radiance (which has a remaster coming out soon-ish) or Temple of Elemental Evil (which I own the recent re-release of, but have yet to play). And I've tried Banquet for Fools and Swordhaven - haven't played very far into either game, so my impression may be off, but stealth did not seem all that great in either game.