Originally posted by FissionChips:

Who said they've optimised it? And who said they can reduce polys? The problem with merging pieces to reduce polys is each piece in this game is distinct, taking distinct damage, etc - you'd just have to break them apart again later when something happens, possibly at a performance penalty for all the calculations, e.g. which distinct subpiece of a merged piece was even hit?

Not at that level. Talking single piece, often you can take away a surface/triangle and hide that with an updated texture. And they may not have to go to that level of detail, there are literally hundreds of things to try when optimizing graphics these days, its a large task and what I know is 15+ years out of date, so the crude ideas I throw out are just that. At the end of the day we know it needs to be done, whatever that really entails.