The Lost Big Boss said:
The smoke can be argued, sense it is a still. Yes, the shadow on the wall in pic one isn't that high res, along with the razor sharp shadow. But look at the lighting on the soldiers on both pics, thats what my eye was drawn to. I really don't see any flat textures, besides that wall. But just look at the vistas, the backdrop. That looks fucking sick. And the shadows of the soldiers in pic 3 are not bad at all, and look good.
Also, I never said that tessellation eliminates jaggies, didn't mean to give that impression by my wording. Also here is a vid of Frostbite 2.0 that is going to be used in GDC this year.
The smoke cannot be argued unless that is multiple explosions. Volumetric smoke would be a singular cloud, not a jumbled mess of circles that are smoke colored. The lighting is also fine on the soldiers, it's the shadow maps I was pointing out, they are not uniform, meaning they are low resolution. The shadows could be argued that they are wrinkles in the fabric, but we know better than that, also they don't coincide to the wrinkles in the textures.
To point out the flat textures I will point you to the soldiers glove in the second image for a bright shining example. The armor is pretty bad as well, but seriously what is up with that wall? >.>
Also the video, without commentary (I'm not an expert on lighting either, so I can't just tell

) looks more like they're showing off lighting changes, and how they dynamically happen. Which is nice, but they don't seem to have improved the lighting in the stills from any other games we've seen.
I'm not saying the game doesn't look nice. I'm just saying it looks average right now. It either can't be shown properly in scans, isn't up to the visual brilliance they want, or hardware limitations or...well lots of other things. It really doesn't seem to be pushing anything. We'll wait and see though, I have no doubt it'll shape up to look better.