It still looks good but too many of the downgrades after seeing that is quite depressing. Especially the missing foliage. Plus from what I've read, no ultra widescreen support yet for those immersive PC gamers.
Watch Dogs situation all over again.
The question I'd like to know is, why such drastic changes? Was the E3 2017 on a high end PC then gimped for consoles because the framerate would tank...
It's irritating that this is now part and parcel of game releases. They show off things that look really impressive then dumb it down substantially for the final release. Crysis back in 2007 was no different with the jungle fight vids that actually seemed to be pre-renders more than they were actual gameplay.
Speaking of Watch Dogs, I think it's probably a similar situation. You can see here (
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/08/18/watch_dogs_performance_image_quality_review/4) that even with mGPUs you'd have been hard pressed to really run the game fluidly, especially since that's still not fully maxed out. And that's after the downgrade.
If we look at WD2 and the myriad of options it offers, it shows a similar story (
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/05/24/last_gen_games_max_iq_perf_on_todays_gpus/11) - the game simply murders GPUs.
Thing about all these settings is, there's not a linear increase in the power demand. So the further you push the quicker the curve jumps up for power-demand. I'm sure there's room for further optimizations in there but unlikely to be anything major, and certainly not immediately. And of course, they're not simply designing the game with maximum graphical fidelity in mind, they also have to account for consoles, lower end PCs, all the troubleshooting that goes with that etc. A resources problem ultimately, at both ends (cost & revenue).
Another important point is, Bioware isn't that technically gifted of a studio(s). I'm sure they get help from Dice but they can't hold their hands all the time. I always think of the example of Galactic Civilizations 3 vs Civilization 6 as a useful illustration of this issue. Even though Firaxis is a WAY bigger studio, with a bigger budget and all that, nonetheless they put out a strictly inferior product on the technical side compared to GC3, whose main optimizations rely on Brad Wardell's occasional focus (read here:
https://forums.galciv3.com/487528/galactic-civilizations-iii-map-sizes-and-memory). And of course he's not the only such exception, another one we can think of is John Carmack & id Engine. I'm sure there's a similar story here with Bioware, they simply don't have these exceptional individuals on the technical side (nor anymore on any other side apparently).