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Because their bloom effect doesn't come over edges, it stays within the model. But you're probably right, it's probably or could just as well be normal mapping. Still, normal mapping usually doesn't give this glowy effect and they've already used ambient occlusion in their other games (Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo), Rare is generally quite underestimated when it comes to their technical talent.



Ambient occlusion has nothing to do with bloom. Bloom is a postprocessing shader and ambient occlusion is a shading algorithm.

Normalmapping has nothing to do with the lighting algorithm used. The only thing normalmapping does is allow you to define a normal for every pixel, instead of every vertex. This normal (instead of the interpolated normal of 3 vertices) is then used in the lighting algorithm to determine from what direction it will recieve light. You can have normalmapping with diffuse lighting, specular lighting or anything you come up with really..

shader tutorial