Lets go over the possible causes for concern and confidence and try to make a judgement under that context.
Points indicating possibility of a downgrade:
- The demonstration did not consist of live gameplay and was seemingly prerecorded
- Highly scripted nature of the gameplay shown indicates this is very much a tailor made vertical slice
- Odd camera movement/direction during various transition scenes are somewhat suspect and could indicate at the very least a heavily directed and tailored video
- The two most recent games developed by the sutdio (Bioware) and built with Frostbite (Andromeda, Inquisition) were downgraded on release in comparison to early footage
- General industry trends towards downgrades following initial reveals
- The scope and breadth of the game is immense making such intricate detail and graphical representation throughout quite the ordeal
- Previous games released using this engine that have met original expectation were both produced by a totally different development team and represented a completely different scope and scale despite this new project appearing just as or perhaps even more graphically impressive
- The game still has a substantial amount of development time remaining during which any number of graphical changes could be required during optimization since this is generally one of the final processes of development.
Points indicating possibility of no downgrade:
- Some recent games released utilizing the same engine have met or exceeded graphical expectations from their respective initial reveals
- Analysis shows that, at the very least, some of the demo was indeed running real time on HW
- Publisher states that this demo was running on XB1X HW
Looking at this breakdown (undoubtedly I've missed some points) its clear that evidence heavily skews towards one conclusion over the other. Even assuming the statement from the Publisher is indeed believable, which I think many would argue against, and that what was shown was running on an XB1X theres still the matter of his being such a highly scripted prerecorded verticle slice which would tend to indicate it would not be representative of the actual gameplay experience. Every point you could consider as indicating it might not be downgraded has a some sort of caveat involved. Couple this with the industry wide trend and it it seems substantially more likely that we will see some downgrades graphically before the game releases next holiday season. At this stage there does not seem to be much at all to promote any sort of confidence that the end product will indeed acheive the graphical benchmark of the initial gameplay reveal trailer. That's not to say it couldn't come out and look like it did in the reveal. It certainly could. Its just that this seems far less likely than the alternative given the context. So, to me, its pretty baffling that so many are insisting it will, without a shadow of a doubt, not see some significant graphical changes.