Although I think it's extremely important to move forward in making artists do less work, I do not expect that a full zbrush model without any retolopogy to go into the engine and expect it to just work, specially because most of the time you also need to take care of animation and texture/uv. Also I also worry about download size. So there are still many reasons why you'd want to optimize the hell out of a mesh in a game engine even if it has the capability to support millions of polygons.
In the video they say that they animated the high poly golem mesh using their new animation tools and they are certainly marketing it as 'zbrush directly to engine'. I'm curious how they went about texturing that massive mesh though and how well it works with humans where muscle deformation is important (I'd imagine the answer is "it doesn't").
Yes but their demo is a 100GB download alone, it seems. That's just a demo. The capabilities of new hardware and engines to render worlds is massively outstripping the capabilities of distribution networks to get that data into people's homes. That's where the next challenge is. Xbox Live is already a long way from being able to deliver games quickly and it will only get worse.
