Splinter Cell series veteran Clint Hocking, who was a creative director on Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, says modern lighting techniques and solutions can have a negative impact on legibility for stealth games.
The news comes from a conversation with FRVR. Hocking, who announced he was starting a new studio in early May, said that one of the difficulties with modern stealth games comes with the “sophistication in the rendering,” which, from his perspective, has made lighting much more realistic.
“When you think about those old school stealth games, because of their baked lighting, the lighting is very clean and readable and very understandable for the player,” he told FRVR. “But once you get into this diffuse and ambient occlusion and all of the stuff that comes with it, it gets very hard to tell what’s light, what’s shadow, what’s dark, what’s safe, what’s dangerous and all of that stuff.”
Put more simply, with so much more detail, stealth games are “so much harder to read.” The simple act of discerning whether you’re actually hidden or not becomes much more complicated.
Hocking attributes part of this to lighting direction, explaining that there is a way of tuning realistic lighting systems for stealth. “When you go and see a play on a stage, the lighting is often super dramatic. So, you can do it with real lights. It’s just that, you know, these places are often lit to be very realistic and not… [for the] purpose for stealth gameplay,” he said.
Discussions about lighting, according to Hocking, have long been present in the industry. Aspects like theater lighting and aesthetic lighting direction require vast experience. Meanwhile, the more basic lighting systems of old forced devs to work within constraints that pushed them towards a similar practice.
Modern tech like ray-tracing and path-tracing do allow for a much more accurate simulation of life and light, leading to results that were deemed unconceivable decades ago. Yet, as Hocking explains to FRVR, you can’t just take the technology and build a level and hope stealth works. Rather, the technique needs to be properly applied to the genre of choice.
“I think there would be some learning if we wanted to really use these modern lighting techniques to have a really pure stealth experience,” Hocking concluded. “And, you know, people who go ahead and make that game, I think need to do some really deep thinking.”