Heh.. Those two statements seem fairly contradictory to me.
That would be because they are. One was talking about the Far Cry / Source engines not necessarily having good development tools in comparison to UE3; the other was talking about id's upcoming engine and what they've done to improve things from a development / licensing perspective.
The road, specifically you can tell is looped over and over again. The tops of the cliffs just look off, like they just took the rock texture and stuck it there. Check out the sand dunes on the outside of Refinery on the ET:QW page for a comparison. (The sand dunes there are extremely noticable in game IMO) Most of the rocks on the terrain in Crysis just fade out into grass.
Yes. Crysis is far from perfect, though you don't play the game like that to notice things like the looping road texture. It's hard to make a comparison between ET:QW and Crysis because they're not meant to be played like that... it would be more suitable to compare it to Battlefield 2 and texture looping isn't as much of an issue (though it's getting on a bit and doesn't hold brilliant to today's standards, having a lower texture resolution). I always thought the textures in Crysis were a quite lacking, especially as mountains (as you rightly point out). I'd assume if a game based on more conventional texturing techniques was released and was designed to be played from a height the issue wouldn't be as prevalent, if at all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for things that improve graphics / immersion. Texture compression started off as a limited experiment by S3 and Unreal Tournament but went on to become a standard, much as MegaTexture could - it's just not as radical as Carmack would like to have us believe (as least not based on ET:QW and the earlier preview of id Tech5).
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