Pawel from CDPR here
>the game has been downgraded?
Really. To what are you comparing the recent footage? The VGX trailer? Then your attention span is not very good. The VGX trailer had many graphical fuck ups - poor textures, texture pop-in 5 feet in front of Geralt, jagged shadows, clipping of everything, no hair physics, barely any shaders and so on.
You were of course fooled by the perfectly set and lit scenes, but if you thought every single scene was going to look like that, then you are a fool.
>the game does not look as good as I thought it would
That's better. Still, we have only shown the High settings so far, so we still have a few aces in our sleeve. Hairworks, Tesselation, volumetric clouds, bump-mapping, HBAO+ and of course Ubersampling. We are putting finishing touches and all of those as we speak.
>the game looks the same on consoles
Of course it "does". But even the journos already noticed that the consoles don't look as good as PC on the supposedly equal "High setting" so it looks like act is running out of time. Yeah, consoles use the same models and textures, but what matters is what you throw over this basic shit.
>the game is unoptimized. It barely ran at 30 fps on two 980s during the previews.
What is optimization? When you optimize, you work your way from the bottom to the top. We are in the middle of optimizing the game for the high and ultra settings and we still have 3 (that's 6 in the crunch time speak) months to finish it. Everything will be fine and you will be able to run the game maxed out on the recommended specs.
I hope I cleared some air. Carry on :')