Actually no, you are wrong Ghost uses most modern tricks seen in other games. There's tessellation, displacement maps, POM, Screen space reflections (BF does not uses it, or even Ryse), Sub surface scattering, etc etc the list goes on. The game is quite heavy on shaders and polygons but it has a simplistic lighting engine, one that isn't doing calculations in linear space and the rendering is not physically based...all because of the fact that using a fundamentally different method to compute lighting would cause issues with contents when they transfer it for use on the 360/PS3 version. Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 already use linear space lighting because Treyarch realised it a long time ago that it was better.
The engine is NOT an issue here, people need to understand engines don't get archaic unless they are limited by the architecture themselves (like Source, where you can't do more than 1 shadow casting light source per scene), but even then with modifications you can get around it. Case in point? Splinter Cell Blacklist which was one of the best looking games from 2013 and it uses UE2.5, but it looks better than most UE3 games and has real time lighting and shadowing which almost every UE3 game lacks. Or how about comparing a game using new UE3 like Gears of War Judgement or Bioshock Infinite to the old UE3 games Gears of War 1?
If the COD studios labelled their engine with a name and called the one in Ghosts Engine 2.0 or 3.0 something like that people would not even talk about this at all. No one writes an engine from scratch. I wrote the exact same thing in a past I made in the previous page.
