Counterpoint: What studios even are likely to plausibly have game releases in the time frame in question? What games or potential games would we even really be talking about here, and are those games necessarily the types that need to totally alter their fundamental designs in order to 'kinda work' on X1?
If we are talking about a literally handful of games, which I argue we are, and if those games are already designed to scale on PC anyhow, which I argue they likely are, then what kinda resources are really needed? And how would that really compare to the resources used to scale the game to run on PC anyhow? Is it likely to be drastically different? I dunno, but I'm doubtful it would change things much. Also, the payoff might be crucial to MS blurring the lines between gens and promoting their generation-less strategy. So it might well be worth whatever effort is needed imho. I am arguing that it wouldn't require all that much effort across the board and that potential payoff could be big for them. /shrugs
The visual identity of GoW, aka the art direction, is not drastically held back by weaker hardware imho. You can find ways to reduce quality and fake every thing you listed there to make it run on a much weaker machine if it absolutely had to. Will it retain its 'identity'? That doesn't even make sense to frame it in those terms. If the core element of a game that makes it a special experience is its visuals, those can all get dialed back for weaker hardware and if it isn't a great experience, who cares? MS likely won't as it would only serve to push those X1 gamers to upgrade to XSX for the 'real high end experience'.
I think folks here GREATLY underestimate how far down ya can scale visuals when ya aren't all that worried about making that version marketable and might even wanna contrast it with the XSX version. When increasing fidelity ya run up against diminished returns across just about all aspects of the art assets, but going backwards to decrease fidelity the opposite happens. Going from 1080p-->4k costs a lot more than just 4 times the computing power usually. Going from 4k-->1080p opens up a lot more than x4 computing power to contend with weaker specs. With that in mind, if the game is limited by GPU, simply going from 4k/60fps-->1080p/30fps should basically erase the hardware delta all at once. On the storage side of things, adding in tricks to hide loading as stuff streams in is not an alien design choice for modern devs and using lower res art assets also helps tremendously with that, as does using fewer objects on screen and thus fewer textures. On the CPU end, lower framerates means big help to CPU resources and devs can reduce AI and physics as needed too as well as do fewer draw calls, etc.
