I can assure the game looks great on a 65" 4K OLED at a closer than normal viewing distance. To it's about how it looks as a cohesive whole, not when zooming in to tiny windows of the image. The reflections may be flawed but in practice they work well in context of the rest of the image. The devs are making compromises within the bounds of their resources and in line with the given art style. If anything the coarse specular [or sometimes the noise] of harder reflections can actually make water look quite unpleasant unless it's done flawlessly (something I wouldn't expect outright of a 2022 PS4/PS5 game w/o RT). In practice, leaning into a more diffuse look can be beneficial if you don't have the resources to pull off accurate reflections.
And those trees looked clean and smooth during play. It's one of the densest, most balanced, most coherent and most pleasing images I've seen off of a console. Temporal stability in motion is ridiculously good in the quality mode @ 30/40fps (and eventually so in the 60fps perf mode), especially when you consider how dense foliage can be and how well even the finer details are shadowed. I'm incredibly fussy when it comes to artefacts and yet in motion this game does a great job of obscuring them most of the time.
There may be plenty of games utilising greater horsepower to do more complex things which are technically impressive in and of themselves, but this game does a great job of minimising its flaws with various choices; and overall it just looks wonderful. Also the character detail in-game is exceptional, the self-shadowing and subsurface scattering absolutely makes it. The general shading, transparency and caustics of the water is artistically spot on. The underwater shading and post-processing is the best I've ever seen. Finally the overall depth, the atmospherics, the fog, how far foliage/shadows render in; it all just hangs together really well the majority of the time.
As for the screens, they're JPG 80% 1080p reductions inadvertently taken from 1440p jpegs which were themselves compressed from 2160p HDR>SDR PNGS which are on an old HDD and not at hand at the time. These weren't meant for pixel-peeping but just as general examples of the overall image to convey how I felt about them. The point of my post wasn't hey look at the reflection quality on the water or how well delineated miniscule background foliage is, but instead how striking the water looks in general and how impressive it is given it's effectively a PS4 game with some bells and whistles.
Having an amicable discussion about the finer details is obviously fine given what this thread is, but a general "hey this looks nice" isn't some afront and is fine too. As for GIFS, people like making nice looking things that are favourable. Most of us are aware the games don't look like that on a full display and ultimately it's just a format conducive to quicky displaying something in motion on a forum thread; and that conveys the general feel.
