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:
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.
Is this "him wot worked on" a typo or a deliberate style of speaking, presumably for dramatic effect?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.