Anthem... gameplay trailer and one question!

I imagine Anthem will launch on EA Access.
Like MEA before it, people can try the game before ordering or listen to feedback from those that try it.
There's no reason for anyone who is cautious to be tricked into anything.

That's not good, but I'd rather that than have it be like Dragon Age Inquisition where the whole game was limited by the capabilities of the previous gen consoles.

Catering to the least capable machine isn't necessarily desirable.

In most cases visual downgrades will happen. Doubly so if you aren't running it on a PC at ultra settings/4k, since that tends to be what developers use to show off a game.

That said people will quickly forget about the visual downgrade so long as the game itself is actually good, which is what matters far more than the game looking like it did in the trailer in my opinion.

Consoles are a lot closer to the average PC gaming rig, particularly with PS4 Pro and XBoneX. The specs are getting quite decent. So it should no longer be the case of having to "dumb down" a game to fit in a console. On the contrary, the average to below average gaming PC running Win7 is looking like the least common denominator.

But designing to the LCD is still going to happen, how could it not? You want the broadest possible market for a game, particularly a version 1.0 new franchise. Hopefully, though, the dumbing down will be graceful degradation without sacrificing anything in the high-end. HDR vs. non-HDR and 4K vs. HD are obvious trade-offs that shouldn't hurt the high end at all. Maybe someday will get to the point where the game looks and performs as well as possible for each of low-end, mid-range, and high-end. You just get more awesome on the high-end.

To be honest I would blame mid-range PCs as much as I do consoles for them not wanting to push things. The reality is that the average PC gamer isn't running a rig with a 1080ti or Titan Xp, which are about the only 2 cards you should even think about right now if you're aiming for 4k @ 60 FPS(and even then, they'll struggle to maintain it at all times).

Also things like no female Krogans or Turians in the earlier Mass Effect games wasn't because the Xbox 360 couldn't handle it, but rather because they didn't want to use the development resources on making those models and animations.

Though the visual downgrade usually comes in the form of visual effects so that they don't have to worry about optimizing them or developing them further so they actually work properly. What we saw was a heavily scripted few minutes of Anthem, so many of the things we saw wont be working properly as they say it's going to just yet.

If the percentage of people who will experience it is too small, it's often not considering as being worth spending that much of your development time on it. Keeping the visuals as we saw it in the trailer very well might require that they give up something else in the game that's more important than pretty visuals.

A lot of the time they use tricks to make it look like how they intend for it to be in the final game. That dynamic weather we saw in the Anthem trailer for example probably isn't dynamic right now in the game. It was very likely a script designed to do exactly what we saw in the game, because that's much easier to code and that's how they intend the final thing to look anyway. This is why changes from presentations even happen in the first place, sometimes they figure out that they don't have the time or resources to do what they originally showed off.

When we're talking about stuff that's in alpha that was never developed further, it's a miracle that it even runs on the developer's machines much less the wide array of machines that customers will have.

It's generally just not worth putting into the game, not even with a note about how unstable it's going to be. Most of the time developers get bashed for putting half developed features in their games.