Seriously how anyone can keep saying this game doesn't look phenomenal and blow everything else at least on consoles is beyond me, the visuals in the trailer were astonishing, definitely surpassed that early reveal. This section of gameplay showed that the E3 segment was rendered in real time on PS4, there's no downgrade, the level of mist in the E3 build is much greater, lighting is different (remember current gen has dynamic lighting) and there's the level of moisture and a very close look at Nate's face.
Reading the earlier comment from the guy saying he thinks the opener is CG was hilarious, developers can't do that with such seamless transitions unless there's time to load the video file from the HDD, there wasn't even a split second for a camera change to let that happen.
As for the whole panning in close and seeing more detail, as others have said it's called Level of Detail and every game has it, it's no different than real life really, you don't see the finest details of objects until you get your eyeballs closer to what you're trying to look at, you people think that you'd be able to pick out the fibers on your curtains from 10 metres away? No? Didn't think so.
The amount of people downplaying this game, it's downright immature, obviously the other extremes of saying it looks like real life are also ridiculous, but I think saying it's realistic and drastically beyond pretty much anything seen on a platform to date is actually pretty much bang on the money. If these people are unimpressed then they've been either over expecting or they need their eyes checked. Maybe they've not watched a decent stream or something, but the reality is that from a technical point of view the amount of stuff going on in the visuals department is immense, this hasn't been done like this in a game before.
The realistic movement of the foliage, the physics of material interaction, stuff like collision detection, how the models actually look like their walking on the surfaces they're meant to, the water effects.
The thing that really got me was all of the particle effects, like how the mist hangs and moves in the air.
The lighting is beyond gorgeous, how it effects everything in the scene.
None of the stuff shown looked scripted too me, especially when Nate climbs up the loose rocks to get to his "brother" (definitely sounded like Troy Baker too me), they look like their falling as they should, with weight.
The additions to gameplay, bigger environment than seen previously in an Uncharted or even The Last of Us.
It really does seem like you can explore that island.
The level of polish actually reinforces my thoughts that this could very well be a late Q2 early Q3 release.
I can't wait for this, I get why all of the haters are so salty, but it is pretty sad IMO.
