I didn't really notice much about "just on the cell", but more an emphasis on not feeling burdened by having limitations. In both storage or having to worry about number of animations going on. One of the big success of the PS1 was have extra space with less constriction. Though the battle of space doesn't seem to matter as of the PS2 era.
I really love sandbox worlds, especially with the ability to climb any and jump just about anywhere. It's why I liked AC. While I'll be missing out on this game for a few years I like the looks.
Saying that there was absolutely nothing in the game play engine itself that couldn't be done on a Dream Cast. Keep in mind that game play engine is different from graphical engine.
@Grass issue
Rendering game grass and light grass are very different. The game grass likely are a series of billboards, with the grass not having to deal with light and shadow on each blade to blade, just large object to blades. In 3d studios the rendering engine is built to give real time lighting. So what was likely killing the rending was that it was a polygon structure than say a billboard and it was rendering light and shadow off each blade of grass to the other.
I also wonder if the game grass in question is really an individual blade of grass or was a group of grass billboards. The difference is that an update to a root would also apply to the grass below the root. Randomly placing a few hundred of these around an area with numerous groups say 100 groups(data structure) of 100 blades would be far easier while still emulating the beauty of wind swept knee high grass. The over head of each individual object in 3d space of 200,000 objects while maintaining the rest of the game objects would kill memory on a console most systems. Which makes me think of a group like structure was used. It's not that I don't think a strong CPU couldn't handle individual objects, but I do believe that memory overhead would be more of a concern.
Squilliam: On Vgcharts its a commonly accepted practice to twist the bounds of plausibility in order to support your argument or agenda so I think its pretty cool that this gives me the precedent to say whatever I damn well please.
