I think one thing that people should remember, before they post anything, is that there are currently about 250 people pouring blood and sweat into this game, day in and day out, to make it as good as they can possibly make if for you.
Now I'm as concerned about the game's fidelity not living up to the early footage as much as anyone. But nobody should be making comments that disregard or dismiss the amount of sheer effort and life being pumped into this game, by the same people who have released content, patches, and graphical upgrades for all of their games FOR FREE post release.
So it's okay to be worried, it's okay to not be worried, but it's not okay spout vitriol in the absence possible place for it in this discussion.
In regards to the 'Dark and Gritty Feel' that is missing in newer footage.
This is very clearly an artistic styling choice, and one that can be corrected for an individual user if they want to do a little bit of research. Using a directx dll hook to call in an extra sharpening pass or two, and do some slight color desaturation/rebalancing is actually really easy from a technical standpoint, and shouldn't cause noticeable framerate drops.
Those interested in that can do some research on the DarkD3 filter that was written for Diablo 3 on release to correct just such a juxtaposition of given and desired thematic styling.
Now onto grey flatness. Much of that is the fact that gameplay footage that we have been seeing recently is not running any form of volumetric cloud/lighting (as shown off best in the 2013 Nvidia tech demos and VGX/'Debut Gameplay' trailers, though also seen in the SOD trailer.
That means that in order to get the same ambiance in say, a swamp, you need to apply a little bit of a washed out effect to do so.
Many of the recently released 'screenshots' of the game show this greyness gone (as well as noticeable ubersampling, forward lit soft particles, etc) and a few of the other previous advertised advanced features can even be seen in the most recent video footage. This means that those features still exist in the game, though it doesn't mean that they are currently stable in a playable fashion and that further optimization or future hardware might be required to elicit the full detail of the game.
Now vegetation. Yes, there have been some well-illustrated examples of vegetation variety and density being drastically reduced. This is usually one of the first areas to cut in the event of performance issue. It makes a lot of sense that such vegetation detail would be drastically reduced on all but the highest graphical settings.
In many games, (Take Skyrim, for example), even at max settings, vegetation density and variety aren't turned up to the maximum that the engine can handle because it would still crush the computers at the time of release. (A LOD slider bars and an ini tweak a year or two down the road drastically increased realism and fidelity of all of the vegetation)
Whether the old models for vegetation still exist are up for debate given that we've only seen one or two of them, but it doesn't make sense to waste assets, and CDPR has no history of cutting content from their games (only for releasing even more content after release)
On to character models. Much of this has been shown (through clever image color editing) to be mostly due to lighting. The main differences between the post-processed engine footage for faces in the SOD trailer and what's been seen in the recent gameplay footage is the lack of Nvidia Hairworks (a feature you would not want enabled on non-max settings due to the proportionally insane frame hits that it can cause (look at TombRaider)) and a slight lowering in subsurface scattering (the effect that causes skin to look very textured).
Personally, this is very /easily/ described away as the difference between high and 'ultra' settings.
I'm very worried about this game, because I know that I'll only ever have time to play it once, and so when I do it needs to be the full experience. But the more I dig into the specific graphical disparities that can be quantified, the less and less it looks like I will have my fears realized. Especially given that CDPR has both explicitly denied downgrade of any sort, and explicitly confirmed the availability of VGX-level fidelity to people with enough hardware.
I think there is still a need for more information and data. That the lack of recent 'polished' footage is negatively impacting people's opinions of the game even though I can understand some of the reasons why that footage might be withheld.
If we are going to continue discussing graphical disparities, it needs to be clinically, but not critically. This game is the end result of the last several years of people's LIVES. And they deserve respect when we start really breaking down the question of whether or not we the consumers will at some point be able to play the game in the same level of fidelity that was originally advertised. (And to anyone who says the VGX is pre-render, the 2013 nvidia tech demo is proof negative to that opinion, and nothing has been in the later footage that would cause me to believe the current engine is different than the one which produced those effects.)
