...perhaps they're keepnig the poly count down for performance reasons?
Certainly. This one needs to run on the Xbox 360. PB won't be doing the port themselves but they need to make sure to stay within certain limits as far as the engine is concerned.
I still think it looks pretty damn good though.
What I'm more concerned about is their (once again) erratic, unorganized behavior. I remember very well when it became clear that they had fucked up Gothic 3 and when the first apologetic posts came flying in that they said they analyzed what went wrong and that they came to the conclusion that it would have been wiser to finish the core game systems (like the combat system) at an early stage of development.
Well, no shit, but yet here we are, some two years later with the game still a good ways but not
too far from release and we're now told that the combat system that was publicly demo'ed at the RPC is just a "placeholder" because the real combat system ain't finished yet. Say
what?
That's the kind of stuff that really worries me. They're not very good at keeping word. They originally led us to believe that there would be a large G3 patch (from them, not the community patch team) that would turn water into wine. That never happened. They promised they learned from their mistakes and would finish the core systems first for their next game. That didn't happen obviously.
That kind of stuff makes me a little nervous. I really hope that they got their act together but there are quite a lot of more or less subtle hints and signs (in addition to the above) that things might not be quite as rosey as they would like to admit.
But we will only know when the game is released, of course. Until then everything is admittedly just pure fear-mongering on my part
.