Quote Originally Posted by bobbygunz View Post
Namely zone sizes, textures, shaders. It's a little hard to tell if polycount was reduced too, but certainly seems that way on some of the buildings in gridania at least. Zone size is probably the most quantifiable of these since you can measure it, and also noticeable since, for example, Gridania the town is now two separate zones,which is obviously a pretty significant shrinkage from what used to be the entirety of the blackshroud and Gridania together in a single area. Some of this was to promote diversity of environments, but also, I imagine that much of it was due to PS3 memory limitations (i.e., Gridania the city now being split into two separate zones whereas 1.0 could handle it fine in one zone). Graphically, these things were changed to accommodate the lower specs of PS3, so if they threw out the ps3 version, it would make their efforts somewhat futile and downgrades hard to justify, except to say that now the game can be handled fine on low-end machines which could potentially attract a bigger playerbase.
Maybe for the 10 people who could actually run 1.0 on max settings. I had to turn down so much to run 1.0 at a decent framerate but I could run the benchmark with no issues at max. For the vast vast majority of us ARR will look better.