What, how can the specs be that low? It looks amazing, like a true next gen title.
I think if somebody were to break down what the engine is doing, it might not be as much as it looks like on screen, but yes, it
looks like it was made to break our brains.
Tons of effects to dress up everything beyond what you can scrutinize as "reality" (maybe these lights and reflections are real, maybe not, but there's so much bloom and glow and pins and sparkles and blended colors that my eyes aren't asking questions...), lots of layering of environments to make them feel bigger than what you play (they're not procedurally-generated, so that helps, but still, good luck finding games in this arena that hold up against what we're seeing here...), and just an insane abundance of detail work embedded in every environment. There's good tech in The Ascent, but there's also just a lot of hard, hard work.
It's still got to run on an Xbox One, and it's also cross-play (so they couldn't just do a charitable downport on a similar-but-lesser engine, it has to run in the same environment and game systems.) They could cut back but not cut down on the lowest spec range (we likely won't see the X1 or a minimum spec screen/video of it until it ships, of course, but hopefully they make good choices in the cuts.) If there were compromises, though, for getting The Ascent on the board for blow-your-mind next-gen kudos while also ensuring it scales down to run outside next-gen specs, it's hard to see them on screen.