Pretty cool!

One thing I personally dislike in very modern game CG is a tendency to overuse depth of field. For film, *some* use of depth of field can establish the important elements of the view by having them in focus, but in gameplay that is a dangerous thing to do because what the player considers to be important can shift rapidly and is in no way universal or predictable.

But if you play modern games or load up a custom ENB-like shader, they all tend to heavily implement a pretty narrow depth of field by default in what I assume is an effort to "look cool". Very true here, with the settings locking the female character into the focused range and starting in with the blur immediately beyond that. That's fine for a cutscene, but if I'm controlling things in any way or expecting to be able to react to visual information (by, you know, playing the game), the narrow focus really just detracts from the experience. It's like we're looking at the world through a microscope or a camera in macro mode ... just let me see a realistic (often infinite) range of depth in focus!

Over the past few years there has been this trend towards simulating artifacts that you'd more commonly associate with film, presumably to give games a more cinematic feel. Some of them I find really annoying, like film grain, but others like lens flare can actually be used to communicate something you wouldn't otherwise be able to. Likewise, I find depth of field to sometimes be very nicely implemented, even where the effect is really quite strong. Alien: Isolation sort of made a gameplay mechanic out of it. I find it works best when the game only applies it in a context where it makes sense, like bringing up the scanner in Alien, or zooming into one your cities in Endless Legend. Where it fails, I think, is where it is always on and assumes that your crosshair is always going to be your focus.

I always turn it off if I can. Nothing pisses me off more than scoping in on someone, only to have them blur to "indistinction" (if that's a word) because a leaf or blade of grass gets too much screen real estate.

I've been shouted down in meetings for the depth of field thing so many times. So many people don't understand how inappropriate it is for an interactive experience. Film is about controlling the viewers experience, games are about allowing the player to experience on their own. Not only is depth of field a completely unnatural artifact, its presence in games is a misunderstanding and misuse of the medium. Drives me nuts.
Also, most of the things the talking head says during the demo are devoid of any meaning. There's truthfully not a great deal impressive about the demo itself; these guys are wowing people with great artwork and flawless technical execution, (which is still nice), but the hardware/software used isn't as important as they're going on about.

I disagree. Pushing 63 million polygons is no mean engineering feat.
It's 12 times what Square Enix did for its DX11 demo, for a start.

But how do you know she's a witch?

She turned me into a newt!