About that porkies thing...
I checked with my creative director here. He had a look at the YouTube videos.
If you use the traditional method, it might as well be this kind of quality for six months of work. A bit of a shame considering this is AAA work and they must have paid premium price for it. They could have spent lot of time fixing the animations using the older method and found it took ages - the 2 years they spent on this game.
Nobody uses it. Both UDK and Unity supports it, but it is deprecated and not advised to be used.
The person who did the models on Maya is a rookie. If you see that strange video in post #171, the video shows only simple modelling.
No good quality models, textures are bland and simple.
As for whether MikeF is a man of his words, the next lawsuit brewing is either the sponsors money, employee wages and illegal redistribution of fonts and things in the Ashes 2013 game that may back-date to Ashes 2009 game. If they accepted Sponsors money, someone will sue them for their money back...
I wish him and his team, - good luck on their next job and try to show a bit of humility and stop being delusional. They need to spend 5 or 6 years as a rookies and then re-learn everything. They need to realise that they are doing is invalid and learn the correct techniques and methods.
-----------
* models = the computer models in game - stadium, players, wicket, buildings in the background.
* textures = the image on top of the textures. by changing this, you change the outward appearances of the model. If you paint the texture green, the model turns green colour when you look at it.