I don't think anyone is going to convince the cows that the 360 could do Killzone 2. I'm pretty sure it could and I'm willing to try and reason why at least. I think some of you cows are holding on to this exclusive as a last ditch effort to still buy into Sony marketing hype.
First off, I'm pretty sure Killzone 2 is not necessarily pushing more polys than the 360 can handle. Killzone 2's maps/ levels are of a similar scale to many 360 games and consist of largely easy to render shapes. Lots of straight edges that urban settings tend to provide are much less resource intensive that trees and terrain. Anyone who has ever done any kind of mapping will tell you that.
Lighting, while definitely one of killzone 2's strengths has been done on a similar scale on the 360. The HDR and realtime shadows have been done on many 360 games. Both consoles are incapable of rendering HDR for large levels which the likes of Stalker CS and Crysis achieve but in small locations they are fine. I think that the lighting in Killzone 2 is just very well. You also need to consider the draw distance of the high dynamic range lighting in Killzone 2 and LOD.
Textures are not one of Killzone 2's strong points and to be honest the normal mapping seems also to be kept to a minimum. While the lighting is great, there is a distinct lack of surface bump mapping that is quite common in many 360 games gives many objects a flat textured look that many people have pointed to in screenshots. The low res textures are not as apparent when the game is moving quickly such as in motion with full motion-blur implemented.
AA is very well done. I'm pretty sure I watched a dev video of Guerilla where they discussed some of the post-processing effects. They seem to use a general full-screen blur with a film-grain effect. I'm not sure if they use a sub-720p resolution (some have speculated) but there is very little aliasing. This gives the game a very smooth jaggy free look. This is one of the things that makes the game so visually stunning, the total lack of aliasing. Could the 360 do a similar blur effect? I'm not sure on this one but my hunch is that this effect is nothing hardware breaking.
Motion-blur. This has been implemented on many 360 games although probably not as well or to the scale of Killzone 2. However, motion blur again is another one of those post processing effects that is not really a hardware killer. Could be done on the 360.
Bringing it all together, I believe Killzone 2 could indeed be done on the 360. They obviously couldn't do a straight port but built from the ground up, the 360 hardware could handle all of the effects above and in some places such as textures and normal mapping possibly surpass. Killzone 2 is a visually stunning game because of great art and great use of post-processing effects. Levels are built to take advantage of the amount of available memory which is practically identical for both systems. Given the development time and the fact that Guerilla seem to be some genuinely capable developers this time round would lead me to believe if they were given the 360 from the start they would have achieved something of the same standard.
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