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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.
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?
>> Because Quake levels started empty, Quake had invisible "exterior" surfaces that required a separate process to detect and eliminate. If the level wasn't watertight, then the exterior could be reachable and the automated tools couldn't eliminate it. In contrast, because the Thief level started solid, this was never necessary. (I think Unreal's CSG may have started as solid as well.)
It's just unusual. I think C&C: Renegade should be 'solid by default' too.
One of the benefits is what you don't have a problem with the edge cases with an escaped ray casts and view points - you simply don't have casts and views into the infinity.
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.
Completely ruined the immersion for me.
Edit: In Hitman it was called Blend In, and in Splinter Cell it was called Mark and Execute.
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.
In it the player controls a team of stealthy assassins in real time who coordinate to infiltrate heavily guarded Shogunate fortresses. The characters and voice acting are quite well done.
The gameplay is very tricky and fickle but I guess it's fun because yesterday I downloaded the expansion with a bunch of new level to sneak around in.
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.
It doesn’t matter that you think you only have time to mindlessly mash buttons, and it’s not about being realistic, it’s about a game doing one thing very well and not making it optional, it’s a particular type of puzzle to figure out.
Those fans don't want me to be able to muscle through, or don't want themselves to be able? The former is questionable logic at best so I'll assume the latter. The fan of stealth who plays a game that gives them the option to muscle through and chooses to muscle through is responsible for their choice. Don't blame games for giving you a choice, especially when they usually support and motivate one style or another with achievements, specialization trees, or meaningful choice-based narrative.
Stealth fans aren't upset the game gives them the option of violence, as most stealth games involve quite a bit of killing and disabling. So this is a pretentious distinction and arbitrary line coming from a very small but vocal minority, like complaining you can lower the difficulty in a game.
> It doesn’t matter that you think
See this here? This is the problem. You insist that it doesn't matter what I think in the same breath as telling me it matters what you think. The market is telling us both which opinion mattered. People overwhelmingly chose the games that are fun and give freedom of choice, not the ones that "do one thing very well". There's room for these too but there's a reason they're not super popular or common.
That was the original stealth game in my opinion :D
... well, apart from XIII, NOLF, Commander Keen and Agent Sam, of course.
The 90s sure had some awesome games
An.. interesting proposition. Wolf3D is a stealth game too then - there is an option to quietly stab some enemies from behind.
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.
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 strangest misbehavior moment I remember from the first game was like this: There were two NPCs working on computers in a dark room. Behind them was an open door to an illuminated office. I walked into the office and shut the door, they didn't notice there was suddenly no light coming through. I turned off the office light, no reaction. I opened the door again, and then they noticed the office light had gone out.
Going beyond that simplicity to account for other factors you could technically improve the simulation with is where I'm not sure it makes it more fun. Ultimately a mission needs to be conquerable, how far can you go making it more challenging and leave space for the player to push through while remaining plausible. Silhouette, different areas of your body being lit/unlit, whether movement speed of a lit/partially lit person affects detection makes a difference, guards having long term memory and adapting to half of them - they all sound good but I'm not sure they'd actually be rewarding to players and the development studio that implemented them. How do you 'tell the story' of a guard that spots your shape, knows you're sneaking around acts accordingly to take you by surprise and ends your game.
Similar with armor systems in a lot of games, we can probably simulate a lot of coverage/protection and the impact on mobility, that characters ability to fight with various weaponry because of what they wear, injuries, and so on, but for most games it gets abstracted into categories or points. Even if computation challenges of physically simulating that were overcome for dozens of characters in a fight, how do you convey all the consequences to the player to suggest how they can change things.
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
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.
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.
Issue of readability still applies for manually defined stealth areas. You want to indicate these in-game to the player somehow, and more complex lighting does so less clearly than a sharp cut-off would.
> Additionally, no one is actually forcing anyone to use ray tracing or real time global illumination schemes. These are self-inflicted wounds.
Some of the lighting techniques mentioned (like ambient occlusion) are relatively basic by modern standards - it's not just ray-tracing. While there is a market for games that put readability above all else, there is also a pull for games with some level of visual detail, both externally from reviewers/consumers and internally.
> [...] 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.
Hocking just seems to be discussing the challenge faced ("there would be some learning if we wanted to really use these modern lighting techniques"), not using it as an excuse to stop making games.
This is a game design problem. This has nothing to do with the engine. Just remember the bikes in GTA:Online. Utter bullshit from the start, removed, added back because people wanted the utter bullshit of these bikes.
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.
And, as a bonus, the original Splinter Cell 75% off on Steam[2] and 50% off on GOG[3] (same price on both platforms).
[1] https://github.com/Joshhhuaaa/EnhancedSC
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/13560/Tom_Clancys_Splinte...
[3] https://www.gog.com/en/game/splinter_cell
e.g. You can see all enemies thru walls with X-Ray vision, and they have a status indicator hovering above their head that tells you if the enemy can see you or not. Tall grass makes you invisible, guaranteed. The games were dumbed down long before ray-traced lighting came along.
Is this "him wot worked on" a typo or a deliberate style of speaking, presumably for dramatic effect?
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!
Yeah, those stealth games never really clicked for me, with their absurdly imperceptive professional guards standing around everywhere.
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.
He should blame the developers for lacking taste, and ultimately, the higher ups who gave the greenlight (pun intended)
HDR lighting is not sufficient for realistic lighting, but it is required for realistic lighting.
Physically-based BDRFs[1] and such is also needed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...
Splinter Cell games became bad long before we had raytraced shadows.
The mimimi games: Shadow Tactics, Desperados 3, Shadow Gambit are my favourite.. it's view cones but they also depend on the amount of light there is. they're isometric though.
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 (Blacklist, 2013) was actually very decent.
and RPS delivered :DDDD idiots
Direct illumination displays only the "first hit" light that comes directly from light emmiting sources, e.g. the sun or a lamp.
Global illumination (indirect illumination) then adds bounce light that is reflected from the directly lit environment back onto other parts of the environment, e.g. from directly lit walls to other walls. This can also include multiple bounces (indirect to indirect).
When you don't have global illumination, only direct illumination, you get very deep shadows. Anything that isn't directly lit appears perfectly black. Like famously in Doom 3 in 2004. This is why you get so deep shadows in space: you only have the sun as main light source but almost no bounce light from somewhere else.
But even if a game doesn't have any global illumination (bounce lighting), developers in the past were able to avoid unrealistic, perfectly black shadows by always rendering the normal texture colors at a certain minimum brightness. Then the dark shadows merely lower this base brightness to a certain degree rather than appearing completely black.
This was great for a stealth game, because the developers had very clearly defined direct show casting (from emissive lights only) while being able to exactly specify how dark they are compared to the rest of the environment which is directly lit.
But if you introduce realistic global illumination (usually through baked or real-time ray tracing), these tricks don't work anymore. Bounce lighting is very diffuse and it erases the clear distinction between shaded and unshaded areas. Everything lights everything.
I don't think there is a way around this: Either you have clearly defined dark shadows, or your lighting looks nice and realistic. You can't have both.
Possibly a solution is to make the game more stylized, so the missing bounce lighting doesn't stick out negatively. In the past stylization wasn't necessary (Splinter Cell wasn't particularly stylized), because the rest of the graphics weren't very realistic either, so the lack of global illumination wasn't as noticeable.
Metal Gear Solid 2 has a radar with myopic vision cones. MGS has similar myopia. Shadows are irrelevant. It’s just about line of sight. MGS 3 makes the vision concrete: the camo index. For the most part, you just think about: field of vision (hiding behind trees); the surface texture; tall grass (guaranted three-feet invisibility).
And all these games had a bit of grace when it came to being spotted. A little “huh?” window.
I would say that, for graphic fidelity reasons or whatever else, spotting the enemy became a little harder across the games. MGS2 models have stiff movement and they are situated in urban environments. MGS3 models (enemies) have green uniforms in a jungle. Also there are more visual distractions. But the MGS3 infrared vision is really a multi-purpose highlighter: animals (including snakes) that you want to avoid or eat light up; enemies of course; but also claymore mines, destroyable objects like oil drums, and booby traps. (MGS2 also had this in the form of lighting up claymore mines.) Then MGS V improved this by combining the infrared vision and night vision. So in a non-stealth shootout on FOBs you can put on the night vision goggles and have all tangos light up.
A totally different game, Desperados, had excellent night scenarios. Clear pitch-black pockets (top-down) to pile a dozen dead bodies.
> It feels like you could write a big old essay about how changes in lighting technology have shaped stealth. I wonder if the rise of "social stealth", instigated by Hitman and Assassin's Creed, has anything to do with designers pulling their hair out over the balancing of lighting systems?
But Hitman: Codename 47 is contemporary with MGS and Splinter Cell.
Hitman was a cruel social stealth mistress. You have the perfect disguise, but you naturally feel out of place as a muscual white man Chinese waiter. And then you just blasted on for no apparent reason.
Hitman 2 was better and has a “stress” indicator. But it still feels a little arbitrary. You have the perfect disguise but then you have to move through a corridor and you move one foot too close to a goon and the stress meter goes bananas. Okay, so you just move carefully, and with perfect knowledge of where you are supposed to go. But you have limited saves. Ah. And now next you have to sneak through a mountain valley overlooked by tower snipers. Woof, the player feedback then gets awful.