Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
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Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
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Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#2I believe that creative liberties in games and movies are essential. Just as Star Wars would have been incredibly dull without laser sounds in the vacuum of space, there is no absolute need for entertainment to strictly mirror reality. From a design perspective, if implementing a cutting-edge lighting system clashes with the core game design, I think it's perfectly acceptable to fall back on a legacy lighting model.
I don't want a game where Sam Fisher gets spotted and gunned down in three seconds flat. I want a game where I can hide in unrealistically deep shadows and pull off the mission
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#3This just feels like old man yells at sky.
Old splinter cell and other stealth games still used on screen indicators of stealth. It was never "simple lighting" that made the player understand if they are "in stealth or not". It has always been up to the game designers to make visual understanding of what is hidden and what isn't hidden, this has nothing to do with graphics.
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#4I remember playing the demo version of Splinter Cell on my 800 mhz computer. It was laggy, but the framerate would go up when switching to thermal view :D
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#5This feels like a very poor excuse when there are plenty of stealth games, or games with stealth aspects, that are successful despite leveraging modern tech.
Splinter Cell games became bad long before we had raytraced shadows.
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#6This just feels like old man yells at sky. Old splinter cell and other stealth games still used on screen indicators of stealth. It was never "simple lighting" that made the player understand if they are "in stealth or not". It has always been up to the game designers to make visual understanding of what is hidden and what isn't hidden, this has nothing to do with graphics.
You're not wrong, but if you consider the fundamental principles of ray tracing, Hocking's point makes perfect sense. I get that 'realistic ray tracing' is a major marketing buzzword and crucial for competitive advantage.
The core issue, however, is that what the player sees on screen must align with the UI. Baked lighting created hard, discrete boundaries, but modern ray tracing outputs a continuous gradient of scattered light. This inherently creates systemic confusion between the visual feedback and the UI.
The only workaround is to design areas of absolute, pitch-black darkness. But doing so severely restricts level design, not to mention that 'realistic' absolute darkness practically doesn't exist in the real world anyway.
I find myself agreeing much more with the game designer's perspective on this one
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#7The Dishonored creators also talk about this and why they went for cover\LoS based stealth in lets play they did a couple days ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVq0af9DwPU&t=1370s
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#8This just feels like old man yells at sky. Old splinter cell and other stealth games still used on screen indicators of stealth. It was never "simple lighting" that made the player understand if they are "in stealth or not". It has always been up to the game designers to make visual understanding of what is hidden and what isn't hidden, this has nothing to do with graphics.
The best sneaking experiances I've ever had in games is actually in modern Multiplayer games. Dayz and Squad are fantastic sneaking games, its hard, its fun and there's no need for a "You're in a shadow now" indicator - although I always thought those were great.
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#9This has everything to do with art direction, and not technology.
The real world has much more light bouncing fidelity than even modern games. There are still dark things we can't see.
Physically based rendering should be exactly the opposite of what the article is complaining about: it gives you the "correct" way to communicate how light is moving through a space. So the player and the game designer should be able to communicate much more easily, and the artists should be able to focus on actually communicating what they need to, instead of tweaking non physical phong and ambient lighting parameters
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#10This feels like a very poor excuse when there are plenty of stealth games, or games with stealth aspects, that are successful despite leveraging modern tech. Splinter Cell games became bad long before we had raytraced shadows.
Games with stealth aspects rarely scratch the same itch as Splinter Cell did, which I miss. Mind sharing some examples of successful modern stealth games with light-centric gameplay?