Every single shot you posted is either fixed camera finishers with the background completely blurred out by fancy depth of field or straight up cutscenes. Not one of them is free form gameplay.
The thing about baked lighting is you can even achieve path traced quality if you really want to, as long as
nothing on screen changes. The more dynamic or unpredictable you make things, the more inconsistent or flat it looks. The wider the area rendered on screen, the flatter it looks. Naughty Dog and SSM are the kings of high quality bakes. Insomniac doesn't seem to be. They got away with cartoony looking games like R&C or simple indoor lighting setups along with shiny, reflective outdoors in Spiderman.
None of that is in their favor here. Only thing holding this presentation together now is animations, which they excel at, along with sound and post processing.
The montage at the end had some gameplay shots too. They all look exactly like the poor gameplay showcase. Flat and straight from PS4 gen. At least the 2d explosion sprites aren't as low res as some of 007's effects.
The only thing making the one below passable is the fog and post processing
These are their cherry picked shots ie, the best they will ever get.
Heck, even some cutscenes can look
rough. They really thought this was a good shot to go slo-mo on before flashing the title? wtf?
There is no mystery here. What you see is what you will get. Decent to great looking cutscenes and outdated looking gameplay. It's actually shocking to see the game looking worse than Spiderman 2, despite not being open world. Heck, they couldn't even get gore right. It's hilarious looking red boba jelly all over the place with no proper understanding of viscosity or fluid dynamics. They are all balls gushing out, and then vanish to leave a trail-like texture. And then the trail itself vanishes like nothing happened.
Boba jelly everywhere:
Boba jelly gone!
Here's some zoomed in, delicious boba jelly.
Did they even consult with all the other PS studios that do gore properly? If not ND or SSM, even Sucker Punch did it better. They had some boba jelly too, especially Miike mode, but the sheer excess here makes it stick out so bad. None of this looks violent. It's like a parody of violence. Quantity without quality. Like a B-grade slasher flick.
To think they had Hellblade 2 as the target for rendering quality in their own internal presentation that leaked. Jesus Christ. All of this looked ok on the phone earlier today, but watching it on a 4k TV now, I can't articulate it better than this:
