If I'm not mistaken, they use the (surprisingly well optimized) Unreal Engine.
And it might be possible to turn the graphics lower than shown in the trailer.
As Yahtzee once said: "Any game trailer, especially ones that don't show gameplay, are basically two minutes of a publisher soaping their ****sack under carefully arranged mood lighting."
From another episode: "never let yourself get excited by trailers"
So yeah, it looks nice. The ideas are great, but then again I'm pretty sure he had the same ideas for Freelancer (which were too expensive to implement at that time).
Let's just see how good this thing is, once everything is set up.