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.
“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,” Hocking told the site. “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.”
Stealth game developers have always had to think carefully about how to communicate these things, of course. The original Thief introduced the concept of a light gem, providing a more digestible, abstract indication of how hidden you are. Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher wears ludicrous headlamps that somewhat perversely indicate when he's well concealed by making him more visible. Klei's Mark of the Ninja desaturates your character when you're in shadow. Still, I can't deny the point that as a player, I often struggle to know how visible I am in a game with the latest hi-fi lighting tricks.
“Part of it is also just lighting direction,” Hocking told FRVR. “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 lit to be aesthetic to purpose for stealth gameplay.”
The games industry has recently fallen in love with ray-tracing, which simulates the bouncing of imaginary beams of light from surfaces (providing your hardware can keep up). “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 added. “And, you know, people who go ahead and make that game, I think need to do some really deep thinking.”
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? It'd be good to hear more from Hocking about this and other matters. He's just founded a studio, Build Machine Games, after leaving the Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe team in February. I guess I should do the 'journalist' thing and send him an email.
As for Splinter Cell, there's a remake in the offing, but we've heard little about it for years. Ubisoft recently laid off a number of the project's developers in the course of wider book-slashing.