Compare Black Desert and FFXIV, two games released at the same time to the same genre and market
I think that examples actually proves his point. FF XIV, the original release, was in 2010, but it began development in 2005. The game was famed also by its difficult development and being released too soon in an unfinished state. Black Desert was released in 2014, and it started development in 2010. So there is a 5 years gap of difference, which actually supports Lovecraft's cat's point about time being a big factor in how technically impressive a game is. Also you missed the context that, once FF XIV was transformed into ARR, it suffered graphical downgrades and was released on consoles, including PS3, while Black Desert wouldn't receive console ports until 2017, and it was on PS4 and XBOX one. I think it is not a very good example, and it may be better to look for Korean MMO's release on 2010 and then compare. Maybe Vindictus would be the closer example, but still not realy that differently from a technical standpoint, and not that good of comparison as Vindictus is closer to MH in structure, with small hubs where you meet other players, form a party and go to levels, instead of being open world with numerous player playing on the same map at the same time. If I find a better example I'll post it.
Japs are at least a decade behind the rest of the developed world. Maybe you'd know this if you actually played games.
I don't know, I find that it isn't about being japanese or western and more about specific companies. Companies like SQ has some of the best particles effects on the market. The Yakuza series was doing realistic faces for quite a long time. Even in older generations you had shit like Silent Hill 3 and 4 that looked almost like early PS3 games. In Western companies you also have examples of gorgerous looking games like Ghost of Tsuhima and not so good looking AAA games. In Capcom's case, the REngine offer incredible photorealistic graphics, is highly modeable and flexible, being created for slow horror games and ended up being used for hack'n Slash (DMC 5), ARPG like MH and now Open World DD2.
In the topic of DD2, technically speaking is an AAA game made by 1/4** of many other AAA games, and still delivers incredible quality and technology, specially on the physics based combat, all while being a multiplatform release. If that is not a showing of technological ingenuity, then I don't know what is (for modern game development at least)*.
Edit*: added final parenthesis for clarification.
Edit 2**: There is talk that those credits may be incomplete, still not confirmed. If that turns out to be the case, I'll edit and change the post to avoid misinformation
Update on Edit 2: It has been, in fact, confirmed that more people that the fore mentioned had worked on the game, as I have posted
here.