From just this screenshot you can see that they have DoF, improved lighting, improved shaders and improved textures. COD does not aim for large battles. That is for battlefield to do. Complaining about no large battles in COD is directly complaining about the core of the Call of Duty franchise, small and quick matches. Call of Duty is also aiming for 60fps. To get all of those things you want for next gen you would have to burden yourself by having a choppy experience which is not next gen at all.
No, you really cant. I have seen every bit of footage there is for CoD ghosts. I have watched all the trailers and all of the events and hour long marketing campaigns.
This game is NOT a generational leap, by any means.
There is no high precision bokeh DoF in that shot, nor high precision OBMB, nor subsurface scattering, nor screen space reflections, nor volumetic smoke, nor a new lighting engine, nor penumbre shadows, nor improved particle effects, nor any of the other things I listed.
There is better render resolution (it is now finally in HD), and textures are crisper (still nothing to write home about).
Character models are low in detail, destruction is static, death animations are horrible, cloth, vegetation, water, etc are all lacking physics etc.
If you told 10 people that was Black Ops II on PC, 9 of them would believe you.
Notice I did not say higher player count? Large scale battles need not effect the gameplay. As someone who has been playing Call of Duty at launch since CoD 1 on PC, there is no reason SP campaign could not of had larger scale battles, skyboxes in multiplayer could be enhanced to make it seem like a larger scale battle is going on. (See Halo Multi)
Also, seeing as how Killzone Shadowfall is doing almost all of the things I listed at 60fps 1080p on day one launch makes me think a year or two from now we will see devs doing all of what I said, at 1080p 60fps.
It all boils down to the fact that Activision and "IW" are marketing this as "THE NEXT GENERATION OF CALL OF DUTY!" when really its just a cross gen version of CoD.
I fully expect them to eventually step up their game and make a TRUE next gen CoD game. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
CoD Ghosts, is not it.
