Surely people have higher expectations for the environment their avatar is going to be in than a literal box?
Games often only have the highest detail models present in cutscenes, where the rest of the game can be limited, and the camera can be controlled to limit how many characters are visible.
> Surely people have higher expectations for the environment their avatar is going to be in than a literal box?
Yes - they do, but you don't have to get fancy with the environment for 2 static avatars locked in place. What are the odds that rendering a room was dropped because it is allegedly GPU-intensive vs it being a feature that is not fully-baked for a public debut yet?
Games often only have the highest detail models present in cutscenes, where the rest of the game can be limited, and the camera can be controlled to limit how many characters are visible.