alt Hacker NewsI don't see how the lighting tech has anything to do with the ability to make a stealth game. You certainly wouldn't want to simulate and measure the actual light levels in real time. You'd use an entirely separate information system in world space to define stealth areas, points, volumes, gradients between them, etc. The gameplay designers need total control here. You can't rely on emergent properties in the engine's lighting system for a good stealth game experience.
Additionally, no one is actually forcing anyone to use ray tracing or real time global illumination schemes. These are self-inflicted wounds. If you want to make a stealth game and you think baked lighting is the best supporting technical direction, then what is stopping you? Every modern engine still offers this technology and it's incredibly mature. You could make a hell of a splinter cell game if you just got started and stopped coming up with wild excuses about how new, non-mandatory tool features sometimes dont do what we need them to.
This is so obviously untrue. The stealth games that "define stealth areas, points, volumes, gradients between them, etc" are not fun. e.g. think of grass in an Assassin's Creed game: clearly defined, but the mechanic feels cheap and unrewarding because grass functions as a black hole. Contrast that to a classic stealth game like Chaos Theory, that uses actual visibility and sound, that keeps you immersed and challenged through the whole game.