Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth games: "it gets very hard to tell what’s light, what’s shadow, what’s dark, what’s safe"

Finally, a game developer who agrees with my fervently held view that new technology makes everything worse. Celebrated designer Clint Hocking – him wot worked on Far Cry 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Watch Dogs Legion, and the forthcoming Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe – has publicly opined that realistic modern lighting has made life trickier for stealth game creators, because realistic lighting conditions are harder to lurk in. Now you tell me!

“I actually think one of the difficulties with modern stealth games is the sophistication in the rendering has made lighting so much more realistic,” Hocking told FRVR in an excerpt from an upcoming podcast episode. The simulation of, say, diffusion - light scattering from different surfaces – makes stealth games “so much harder to read”, he explained.

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