To be clear though, this is just a first look at WW2, with an emphasis on the premium console platforms - PS4 Pro and Xbox One. And our focus is limited to the campaign, the area of Call of Duty titles where the linear nature of the experience typically allows the developers to carefully budget resources, pushing the sliders up as far as they can comfortably go. It's in this area of the game where COD typically delivers the most bang for your buck, but it's a world apart from the more freeform multiplayer.
Regardless, it's fascinating to see the aesthetic of the game and the core enhancements in technology reflect the series' aim to get back to a more realistic setting. The lighting in WW2 is a massive revamp from what we've seen from the series before, the COD engine (or at least Sledgehammer Games' fork of it) offering up a beautiful, full HDR presentation for the first time. The realism extends to materials too, which fit seamlessly into the scene in all areas. There's also a renewed emphasis on character rendering: WW2 features beautifully realised characters, with remarkably well-realised skin shaders and excellent animation.
There's the sense that Sledgehammer may have pulled back slightly from the super-dense post-process approach seen in Infinite Warfare - film grain is pared back a touch, for starters - but there's still the feeling that the developer is aiming for a cinematic look to the title. Similar to many titles we've seen recently, the game employs a heavy temporal component in its anti-aliasing, meaning that the traditional super-rich detail level associated with native rendering in video games is absent. You can call the presentation soft, but by that chalk, the same can be said for any movie or TV show. Like it or not, techniques such as these represent the future of the video game aesthetic.
And by extension, that makes pixel-counting - which relies heavily on flat geometric edges - very difficult to deploy on this title. Similar to other games that rely heavily on temporal anti-aliasing, the difference between Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro primarily comes down to clarity. The Microsoft platform does render more pixels more of the time, and this primarily manifests by presenting additional detail in the image. It's no game-changer though - things just look a little clearer for most of the time.