Is it just me or as the quality of the game improves, it's more difficult to spot the enemy? In CS 1.6, if you have a cop/terrorist standing against any wall, you definitely will notice it (mainly because walls/buildings/whatever didn't have that much quality regarding details). But in the video of CS 2, since the quality is so great (both for cops/terrorists and for the rest of the maps), somehow I think it's kinda difficult to distinguish others. Like in real life I guess?
The situation was even worse when Valve added custom skins players could buy. Some of those skins blended in with their background a little too well. Their initial "solution" was to add more lights to the maps to brighten them up, but that approach is obviously not great so they added a system to boost player model contrast dynamically against the environment [1].
I think you're right and it's generally a problem for gameplay. Real life scenarios often involve a lot of hiding and waiting. If a game becomes too realistic it starts to simulate that which leads to a boring game.
