Penumbra to Amnesia shadow rendering regression

[Argoon]

I don't know how to increase the shadow resolution sorry i'm not a HPL2 modder,

But know this, stencil shadows also known as volumetric shadows are being replaced on all game engines by shadow map techniques, why, because they are just better, for example it would be impossible to have a good looking forest with dynamic shadows using stencil shadows, for the simple reason that instead of seeing the leafs being casted on the ground you would see the invisible plane (a square) where the branch or leaf texture is applied being casted instead, that is true for any object with alpha transparency, on the other end shadow maps don't have that limitation because they don't use the objects true geometry to simulate shadows.

About why frictional games only made spot lights able to cast shadows and they used them very little on the game.

Imo the first reason was the inclusion of SSAO (Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion ), if you look carefully to a object with SSAO on you will see it almost looks like it is casting a small shadow, so it looks like the object is really grounded (what only shadows could do before), and because SSAO is a relatively heavy effect if they were using shadows galore then the game would suffer badly from performance reasons on low end laptos and PC's, that was imo the other reason, the need for the game to run on a large amount of PC's.