Of course you're correct. There are plenty of situations where resolution changes won't matter, either for technical reasons (display size, viewing distance, etc.) or because the user simply doesn't mind. Pixel counting is only about revealing numerical facts. Interpretation of those facts, or whether you care at all, are separate issues.
The newest footage I know of is the Story trailer from a few days ago. Here's a few direct-feed 1080p shots from it
released by Microsoft on the official Xbox site. I've outlined the elements I'll count in red.
Here are the two test elements for the first shot, zoomed in 6x. Remember that we use near-vertical lines to count resolution width, and near-horizontal lines to count resolution height.
On the first test, I count 15 steps. Resolved back down to its original size, this crop is 15 pixels wide. On the second test, I count 19 steps, and the original size is 19 pixels tall. So these tests indicate native rendering at the same resolution as the originating screenshot, which is 1920x1080.
To double-check, let's count elements from the other shot. Because they're from shallower angles, I've only zoomed in 4x this time.
The first test is a bit low-contrast since the shield isn't in the plane of focus, but I count 16 steps; the original crop is 16 pixels wide. On the second test I count 31 steps, and the original resolution is 31 pixels high. So these tests also confirm native rendering at 1920x1080.
Since we know from Microsoft and Crytek themselves that
Ryse renders at 900p, these results are anomalous. Barring error by me--and please feel free to reconfirm all my counts--it appears that one of two things is going on. The first possibility is that the situation is exactly like the Combat Vidoc: this output doesn't come from One, but as a target render from a PC, at higher resolution than the game will end up.
However, the trailer doesn't have the "not representative" warning on it, suggesting that this is really supposed to be One output. Given that, there's another possibility I think more plausible. Note that all the screenshots Microsoft released are from cinematics, not gameplay segments. So perhaps the trailer does come from One, but the cinematics in
Ryse aren't real-time but instead prerendered, at a higher resolution than the gameplay (and possibly with extra effects enabled). This is not an unusual approach, and it would also explain why some of the scenes in the trailer seem sharper than others.
Of course, the best way to test this would be to pixel count some of the gameplay segments in the trailer to compare. Unfortunately, there's a problem. The version embedded on the Xbox site is only 360p, and there's no version at all on the official Xbox Youtube channel. There are supposed 1080p versions unofficially on Youtube, but they're very blurry either from upscaling or simply compression artifacts. Despite multiple attempts on several grabs, I found counting impossible. (You're welcome to try yourself, of course.)
So for now, it appears Crytek and Microsoft have still not released any footage of
Ryse provably running at its actual resolution. At the very least, we can say that gameplay will definitely not look as good as the cutscene shots above (though those shots might appear in the game as video).