You just dont have to do that? You can change the lighting so it is more informative for a stealth game rather than have it be realismmaxxed for no reason.

This is a peak AAA problem. The need for ultra high fidelity realism clashes with the need to make the actual gameplay.

Maybe they need splashes of yellow paint to show where the stealth area is.

Stop worrying about realism!

It's called art direction. It's a game if you don't want to do realistic lighting that's fine you can do what you want.

In a world where game designers decided "yellow" means "climb here", it seems crazy that a stealth game can't be made with better lighting and textures because it becomes readable. That's the point of stealth.

Chaos theory still looks amazing, and that was on the unreal 2.5 engine with hugely prebaked lighting. Just legitimately do that again.

There are two really good examples of how to represent that from the past two Splinter Cell games. I'm not convinced it got any harder from this explanation.

This is why we have the yellow paint epidemic

It's not any worse than what we had for the OG Splinter Cell except when the developers make it way too damn dark. Hollywood has a similar problem with a lot of modern movies.

Also I find it ironic that one of the things I remember seeing people complain about with Hitman: Blood Money was the, at the time, new system that let 47 highlight usable objects in the world. The previous games made you faf around just trying to use anything because you couldn't tell a random background object from something you could actually use. Lotta people whined that it oversimplified the game.

Oh sure, a genre that got on the radar with a 1987 MSX game, one that became what it is partly because of hardware limitations, is impossible to do nowadays because "now we can do realism".

Talk about creating problems for yourself.

This is one of the critiques I have of modern shooters, too. In Quake 1, if you run into a tough baddie, you can duck around the corner, and bank a grenade off the cement wall, and hit his giant, blocky hitbox. In Modern SciFi Shooter 27, you duck around the corner, and try to shoot a grenade at the upturned market cart that served as the corner barrier, and it bounces away with an odd angle, then misses because the creature you found has elaborate animations, thin limbs, and a thinner hitbox.

Part of why the boomer shooter genre has largely devolved in graphics.

What? As if with global illumination there are no hard shadows. If you walk around when the sun is shining, guess what type of shadow you have? So the solution is to only create levels with few, bright light sources so that hard shadows get cast.

Then just keep the lighting consistent and don’t adjust the camera exposure when players move in and out of light and dark areas. Consistency is key.