Hopefully kojima cracks the whips on those coders. I mean my old 6600 can run even some of the latest gphx demos at like 30fps... and that's on a regular several years old single core pc, not coded to the metal. How many nvidia fairies*(which had uber looking shaders, and looked cg'ish perfect) do you think my machine could handle if coded to the metal, quite a few I would say, so there's no excuse why we can't have multiple characters of such details at least in cutscenes, I don't see what'd be the problem with using lod to have said ingame or using those mass aleatory cloning techniques with advanced lod techniques to have countless such on screen, the ps2 handled 10s of thousands of characters at once after all(crappy looking ones, but even it could load 500 or more decent/excellent looking characters with crazy ass effects, the latter kessens, kingdom hearts ii, zoe2, etc. ).
8 cores speciallized for heavy workloads, and even gphx work, an uber rsx. Extra bandwidth to lubricate the joints. Those lazy @ss programmers ain't being creative enough, there's more than enough power(360 too) there to do pretty much anything.
It's just such a shame... that the ffvii tech demo ran at 60fps on underpowered underclocked h/w, a rush job by a few square guys, and still above 99% of next gen efforts. What does that say about all those other programmers, artists, teams? IT speaks volumes in my book, passion people.
I honestly hope MGS does test the limits of storage, FFXII massive western-like copy paste game design was traumatizing. Leave the copy-paste/recycling to lazy @ss dev.s, I wan't extremely varied and unique textures and buildings, and stuff. Ultra high poly, ultra destructible, ultra animated, ultra high rez textures, they've to be creative with the HDD and use ever better LOD schemes*(some things could even use psone lvls of detail in terms of geometry, texturing, animation and still look ace, making it practically free in terms of resource use, see the FATE model in chrono cross psx for an example of square's man juice/sweat. It looks like something out of a highend ps2 game, and even better than some nextgen-360-ps3 models. There's just no excuse for a psone model to animate/look better than an enemy model for a modern game. )