Surfheart said:
Pity that no other developer has managed to hit the same quality then. I guess it's down to the scale of economies of the app store.
I was on my way months ago, but realized that I couldn't easily support both OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 as a single guy out-of-the-gate, particularly when you think about the huge amount of artwork that needs to be created if you want to use shader magic effectively. I'm sure a lot of other people ran into this realization themselves. It's really a matter of budget.
Where it gets kinda hazy though is when you think about what companies like EA should be able to pull off easily, but choose to not do it.
I'm sure there's also some iDevice engines out there that could theoretically get this fidelity down, but there's a bunch of barriers that are hard to get over:
Appropriate art pipeline (like node-based shader editors and shit, it's hard to compete with UE there!)
Team size to produce the amount of art needed (this is a whole medieval town, all textured, shaded, whatever)
Competence in terms of artwork
Competence in terms of optimization (Epic has a fuckton of experience in the first place and can pick-and-buy competence, basically)
So it comes down to acknowledging that it's hard to play ball with the big boys if you're really small! And a lot of teams making iDevice stuff are rather small, in multiple dimensions. So this level of fidelity would appropriately be expected to be rare on the platform.
There's also other arguments, like the ones I brought above. A big one is that if you make the same money without coding a really intricate graphics engine, you don't code a really intricate graphics engine, right? On the other hand, if you sell really intricate graphics engines
