Quote Originally Posted by Sheer View Post
They would have to essentially redo each file. You can downscale textures, but you can't upscale them - it will only yield a softer image when mapped. Unless they have some special program to do this for them, it would take a lot of development time. So while I don't plan on getting high resolution textures anytime soon, I wouldn't be surprised to hear they're looking into ways to make some textures look less pixelated.
They likely have high-res textures that they downscaled during the optimization process. Many texture artists I know start pretty big, and slowly reduce file-sizes and texture sizes until they hit a sweet spot of looks and desired optimization. I just hope that S-E kept a few of their larger versions around.