This just feels like old man yells at sky.
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.
+1. At the end of the day, this boils down to a more general problem of conveying state/data to the player (though maybe I should concede it now arises in the new dimension described by the author).
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!
The implication is that the reason why you don’t see a lot of people sneaking around splinter cell-style in real life is because the lighting makes doing that really hard
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The best sneaking experiances I've ever had in games is actually in modern Multiplayer games. Dayz and Squad are fantastic sneaking games, its hard, its fun and there's no need for a "You're in a shadow now" indicator - although I always thought those were great.