There has been a lot of talk about the alleged resolution downgrade and about the reduction of the polygon count per character in Ryse: Son of Rome, and Crytek Founder and CEO Cevat Yerli took to Twitter to shed some light on the whole hubbub, explaining that no change and compromise has been done in the game's resolution (that remains the same of the build showcased at E3) and quality.

There you have it, straight from the lion's mouth.

It's relevant to mention that optimizing polygons in invisible parts of models and retopologizing them for better performance is a very common practice in the industry. When models are created with a focus on detail, a lot of spurious vertexes end up placed in areas that are by all means invisible, while some times there are overlapping triangles that can be safely removed, this without mentioning what can be done with a higher resolution normal map.

As Yerli said, and as I explained in my related article yesterday, there's no real evidence of any actual downgrade. The raw number of polygons never tells the whole story on a game's visual fidelity and as a matter of fact we can definitely see a series of upgrades, especially in the shaders and normal maps used in the game. If you want to see a detailed comparison with your own eyes, you can find it here.