I would love to use parallax, however it is extremely expensive if you want it to look decent in the slightest - the current UE4 implementation of POM does not seem to be feasible for realtime. It also doesn’t work with distance field lighting which is what we use (The pixel offset pushes the mesh into it’s own distance field mesh, causing the parallax to look extremely pitted and shadowed with very noticeable transitions as you move forward)… while terrain could potentially use parallax, a large part of the visuals rely on the seamless transition between terrain mesh and static meshes, and since static meshes can’t use parallax, that’s out. And that’s not even mentioning the gameplay issues that come with it, such as character feet sinking through or hovering over the parallax. Tessellation carries the same issues though slightly differently. If you have any solutions to these issues, I would definitely look into adding parallax into the game.
The earlier screenshots also are from back before landscape normal maps were improved. Week 22+ really improves the landscape quality in that regard.