I'll just clarify it again; When I said the "fixed" camera layout was a possible advantage, I didn't mean to suggest that the engine wasn't rendering more than what you saw from the fixed angle. I was more highlighting the fact that knowing that the game is seen from 'predictable angles' most of the time gives certain advantages to how you budget your scene and where to dedicate resources opposed to perhaps this new incarnation of GoW that looks to have a more floaty 3rd person camera similar to say Uncharted that is perhaps even user controllable and offers a very long view into the scene. The fact that you are now dealing with a scene that is much more explorable because you can walk up to any object and actually get a very close look at it as a result of the camera being much closer drastically increases the required fidelity to pull of the entire scene. Again, compare this to a game where the camera is situated from a higher angle most of time and only pulls into close-ups during certain moves.
I think this is quite apparent when you go back and play GoW3. It's a beautiful game with amazing art, but most of it is always viewed from quite a distance. If you actually had the means to go and inspect all these little details up close, you'd probably see that [compared to other games with a more conventional camera set-up] that it's lacking in places you wouldn't have thought, because during normal gameplay, you won't get even close to it.
I mean, it's all quite logical in the end. Performance is limited and what you see and how good something looks is always a bit down to smokes and mirrors.
I think this is quite apparent when you go back and play GoW3. It's a beautiful game with amazing art, but most of it is always viewed from quite a distance. If you actually had the means to go and inspect all these little details up close, you'd probably see that [compared to other games with a more conventional camera set-up] that it's lacking in places you wouldn't have thought, because during normal gameplay, you won't get even close to it.
I mean, it's all quite logical in the end. Performance is limited and what you see and how good something looks is always a bit down to smokes and mirrors.
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