41–50 of 76 posts
Hitman WoA is pretty popular and well designed stealth game
Ironically, the Splinter Cell suit would stand out like a sore thumb if they were seen like Agent 47 is seen most of the time.
As an aficionado of the genre, it is a real shame that stealth games have fallen out of favor with the current crop of gamers. 90s and early to mid 2000s seems like was the peak for 3D games with deep storylines and pure stealth mechanics (MGS, Splinter Cell). By the time the late 2000s rolled around we started getting the watered down hybrid model aka stealth but you can play it like a FPS or TPS if you prefer. Fina…
This allows players to pick their style so hybrid games target a much larger audience. A game which allows you to go full stealth if you choose to, but also go gung-ho on your enemies makes more players happy. It's a good compromise if designed well.
I was replaying Dishonored and realized that I no longer have the same amount of "disposable time" to go all stealth. But still wanted to go through the game so I put on my Rambo bandana and went to work.
Realism was never a real trait of stealth games, or any game. At best we aimed at visual realism but everything else about every game is unrealistic. The health system, or enemy alert levels, even the save game system, etc. I don't see why the technical implementation of the stealth should be more realistic than "if you sit in this predetermined area you are invisible". In Splinter Cell you'd sit in unrealistically dark shadows. In The Last of Us Part II you can completely hide in grass that's not even knee high. In Mark of the Ninja you can hide behind a barrel from the player's point of view but on the side of a barrel from the enemy's point of view. Screw realism, make the game fun and it's enough.
As an aficionado of the genre, it is a real shame that stealth games have fallen out of favor with the current crop of gamers. 90s and early to mid 2000s seems like was the peak for 3D games with deep storylines and pure stealth mechanics (MGS, Splinter Cell). By the time the late 2000s rolled around we started getting the watered down hybrid model aka stealth but you can play it like a FPS or TPS if you prefer. Fina…
Alien Isolation had a brief time in the spotlight for being a pretty serious stealth focused game.
Splinter Cell and Thief are the only series I'm familiar with that actually have light and shadow based stealth. Everything else is all hiding around corners or inside/under furniture, like Metal Gear Solid. The Splinter Cell lighting stuff never made much sense anyway, since you'd be perfectly fine if you were standing in a shadowy patch while making a clear silhouette on the illuminated wall behind you. The strange…
As an aficionado of the genre, it is a real shame that stealth games have fallen out of favor with the current crop of gamers. 90s and early to mid 2000s seems like was the peak for 3D games with deep storylines and pure stealth mechanics (MGS, Splinter Cell). By the time the late 2000s rolled around we started getting the watered down hybrid model aka stealth but you can play it like a FPS or TPS if you prefer. Fina…
And don't forget Thief, the king of medieval stealth punk fantasy loot games. Self promo: I wrote a tiny post about an interesting technical detail of Thief's game engine - the world is actually solid, and gameplay areas are carved out of it like caves. https://crabmusket.net/2025/the-solid-universe-of-thief-the-... More here: https://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html#csg
This is true of Unreal Tournament too. How unusual is it?
I 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.…
You can either do it where the safe areas are just super dark, raytracing be damned, or you can do it where even if there is light, and you're clearly "visible" as long as you stay below a certain light level, everything is fine (Minecraft style, perhaps).
Additionally, no one is actually forcing anyone to use ray tracing or real time global illumination schemes. These are self-inflicted wounds. If you want to make a stealth game and you think baked lighting is the best supporting technical direction, then what is stopping you? Every modern engine still offers this technology and it's incredibly mature. You could make a hell of a splinter cell game if you just got started and stopped coming up with wild excuses about how new, non-mandatory tool features sometimes dont do what we need them to.
He should blame the developers for lacking taste, and ultimately, the higher ups who gave the greenlight (pun intended)
If you throw a flare around a corner and it bounces of just right, you'll see you enemy's shadow as they're approaching.
This 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.