I'm an admitted Sony pony, and even I can't deny its looks like a Ps4.5 game. So many people were gushing about the how good it looks in the trailer thread and I was just confused. I thought maybe they were watching it on better screens then myself.
Not a sony pony but horizon was my gotg and horizon 2 is my most hyped game of the year by far so the bias is there, but i never thought for a moment that it looked like a fully nextgen game (and people can research my posts about it, even before knowing that it wasn't crossgen).
I think people are impressed by the game for a number of factors:
-without considering crossgen, nextgen etc, the game looks gorgeous to begin with, it really is at least top 5 of best graphic ever in a game, some would say top 3, very few even best graphic ever.
-it looks on par or better than demons\ratchet, even if those games are fully nextgen (ands smaller in scope) and made by people who know how to make great graphics, this is highly impressive.
-the art design and how colors pops out make the game looks better than it really is, similar to tsushima.
-people forget how good horizon still looks today, except for aloy, the models of erend or sylens or the thirsty black guy or the other npcs they showed are not a clear jump from the past game, same for the dinobots, they were already crazy detailed in the first one, in the sequel they just fixed the few low res textures they had, they look better but they don't look nextgen only better.
hellblade 2 and maybe wukong are the only games that i consider fully nextgen looking, and wukong still has some old gen stuff in it.