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.
Finally in the 2010s seems like even these hybrid stealth games were on their way out for the most part. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can count the number of releases on one hand.
My pet theory is that these types of games are simply too high brow for casuals who have become a larger segment of the target audience.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a flash in the pan (although the asymmetric horror genre continues basically dominated by dead by daylight).
Yet, the sheer exhilaration I felt the first time one of the "killers" walked past me as I kneeled in a bush was quite spectacular.
It's not the same as splinter cell (it's much more chaotic, you don't get to totally dominate the enemies, it definitely doesn't have that mindful quite as you systematically work your way through a level you know we'
ll).
But the key, I can stand in the right spot and human can't see me really is its own kind of feeling.
>Finally in the 2010s seems like even these hybrid stealth games were on their way out for the most part. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can count the number of releases on one hand.
Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima, Deathloop, Deus Ex, Starfield immediately come to mind. I think a lot of the open-world Ubisoft games also allow you to pick your poison too.
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.
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
True. There comes a point where the endless pursuit of realism starts getting in the way of a certain kind of narrative creativity. And in the process, we lose what should be the very essence of the word entertainment: to entertain.
The other day, I watched Emmerich’s latest film, Moonfall. A proper disaster movie, with all the necessary tropes. In short, that was real cinema, I had a great time. And yet, a large number of reviews on IMDb kept pointing out how “unrealistic” the film was. But if I’m watching an Emmerich movie, the very last thing I want is realism.
I think this is part of the current zeitgeist. The great inversion of real and virtual, as described by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, seems to make people believe that what happens on screen is reality, and then has to reflect their own conception of reality. The slightest deviation from that conception reminds them that it is only fake, and that they must, at all costs, "return to the matrix" in order to escape the real and the existential dread that follows.
Also: you cannot pretend to be "physically realistic" on a computer screen. The simplest thing: if there is more ambient light, your pupils decrease and your sight is different. You cannot simulate "true light" unless you also simulate that.
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).
MGSV had realistic graphics (one of the first games with PBR) and handled it well. One of the devs had a GDC talk about their lighting approach, too.
In the game light/shadow (in addition to what outfit you're wearing, surface you're on, if you've showered recently and other factors) has an effect on your camouflage index. Unlike prior Metal Gear Solid games this is never shown as a value on-screen but instead communicated by clues from enemy reactions and sound cues, where eg. their animation will change to show they've noticed something suspicious from a distance.
This 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
I 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
"Check it out, a licence plate" still rings in my head. It's a random sentence at the very end of the demo. 10-ish me must have played that first short level dozens of times. But as you said, the framerate was ok, and the final game being much more open and effectful it lagged my computer to death. Good times.
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.
+1. At the end of the day, this boils down to a more general problem of conveying state/data to the player (though I should at least concede it now arises in the new dimension described by the author).
Two examples that immediately come to mind are trying to fight in World of Warcraft when underwater (where I had no eff'ing clue where exactly the enemy actually was, relative to my character) and overly flashy effects in games, often MOBAs (where they were taken so overboard to where I had no idea what was even happening on the screen).
I'm surprised people put up with either of these. I found both of them in and of themselves really frustrating and detracting from the fun of just playing the game.
I'll give an affectionate shoutout to Transistor; one of the mechanics is having to deal with paparazzi-like monsters that are just flying cameras whose difficulty is in obscuring your screen with flattering action shots of the protagonist. Lazy, but clever and adorable!
The implication is that the reason why you don’t see a lot of people sneaking around splinter cell-style in real life is because the lighting makes doing that really hard
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.
Can you list some? The stealth genre has pretty much died out, and most games where stealth is not a central gameplay element (e.g. the AssCreed games) implement it poorly.
> Splinter Cell games became bad long before we had raytraced shadows.
The last one (Blastlist, 2013) was actually very decent.
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?
Splinter Cell is definitely on a class of its own. I'm also eager to hear if there are any stealth games that have been released in the past 10 years that AREN'T some vibe coded hot mess on Steam ...
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.
Finally in the 2010s seems like even these hybrid stealth games were on their way out for the most part. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can count the number of releases on one hand.
My pet theory is that these types of games are simply too high brow for casuals who have become a larger segment of the target audience.
Yet, the sheer exhilaration I felt the first time one of the "killers" walked past me as I kneeled in a bush was quite spectacular.
It's not the same as splinter cell (it's much more chaotic, you don't get to totally dominate the enemies, it definitely doesn't have that mindful quite as you systematically work your way through a level you know we' ll).
But the key, I can stand in the right spot and human can't see me really is its own kind of feeling.
Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima, Deathloop, Deus Ex, Starfield immediately come to mind. I think a lot of the open-world Ubisoft games also allow you to pick your poison too.
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
The other day, I watched Emmerich’s latest film, Moonfall. A proper disaster movie, with all the necessary tropes. In short, that was real cinema, I had a great time. And yet, a large number of reviews on IMDb kept pointing out how “unrealistic” the film was. But if I’m watching an Emmerich movie, the very last thing I want is realism.
I think this is part of the current zeitgeist. The great inversion of real and virtual, as described by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, seems to make people believe that what happens on screen is reality, and then has to reflect their own conception of reality. The slightest deviation from that conception reminds them that it is only fake, and that they must, at all costs, "return to the matrix" in order to escape the real and the existential dread that follows.
In the game light/shadow (in addition to what outfit you're wearing, surface you're on, if you've showered recently and other factors) has an effect on your camouflage index. Unlike prior Metal Gear Solid games this is never shown as a value on-screen but instead communicated by clues from enemy reactions and sound cues, where eg. their animation will change to show they've noticed something suspicious from a distance.
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
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.
Two examples that immediately come to mind are trying to fight in World of Warcraft when underwater (where I had no eff'ing clue where exactly the enemy actually was, relative to my character) and overly flashy effects in games, often MOBAs (where they were taken so overboard to where I had no idea what was even happening on the screen).
I'm surprised people put up with either of these. I found both of them in and of themselves really frustrating and detracting from the fun of just playing the game.
I'll give an affectionate shoutout to Transistor; one of the mechanics is having to deal with paparazzi-like monsters that are just flying cameras whose difficulty is in obscuring your screen with flattering action shots of the protagonist. Lazy, but clever and adorable!
Splinter Cell games became bad long before we had raytraced shadows.
Can you list some? The stealth genre has pretty much died out, and most games where stealth is not a central gameplay element (e.g. the AssCreed games) implement it poorly.
> Splinter Cell games became bad long before we had raytraced shadows.
The last one (Blastlist, 2013) was actually very decent.