Why do people keep bringing up this argument for this game? Every aspect of this games technical makeup other than RT are mediocre by last gen standards.
Probably because other people keep bringing up the false equivalency that a game is only going to really look great if it's current gen only, and that is just patently not true. Absolutely nothing about being cross gen prevents a game from potentially being the best looking game of the current generation of consoles. It all comes down to what the hardware target is.
So, sure, if a developer targets the previous generation of consoles and then scales the graphics up, it's going to hold back the games looks.
OTOH, if a developer targets the current generation of consoles and then scales the graphics down to the previous generation of consoles then there is absolutely ZERO things about it that would prevent it from looking just as good or better than another game that is only released on the current generation of consoles.
It's just unfortunate that during the 2000's most developers switched to console development and the practice of targeting the best hardware available (or even hardware that was currently not available) and then scaled down to lesser hardware gradually died. Epic, CryTek, DICE, and many other developers used to do this. Epic still does WRT Engine development (UE5 for example still supports Nanite on last gen consoles and I don't see people saying UE5 looks like a cross gen. engine), but they no longer make games so unfortunately we don't get to see what they could do with a cross gen UE5 game.
Now developers that really wish to push the graphics envelope and still benefit from last gen's console install base would do well to relearn what PC developers in the 90's and early 2000's were doing. Target the best hardware then scale down is always going to result in better looking games than targeting the worst hardware and then scaling up.
The end result is a game that would look exactly the same as if that developer had targeted the current gen and didn't bother with scaling it down to the previous gen. Actually, I take that back, it'd look better if they were targeting the best PC hardware rather than the best console hardware and the scaling the game down to console hardware (current and past gen).
Of course, the other caveat to all of this is how many developers can afford the budget (time, money and manpower) to truly push current gen hardware or even the best PC hardware?
Regards,
SB
