Neat. The bloom's a bit overdone, but it looks nice otherwise and the use of SSAO is quite nice.
I must say, I'm fairly ambivalent about this title, and have sat out for now. Chris Roberts has a history of trying to over-reach and is addicted to complexity for complexity's sake, and in the case of Freelancer, the game only got done because other people took over and finished it (after it nearly got cancelled for the second or third time because it had gone over budget).
A lot of the design decisions are immensely puzzling.
For example, the idea that each gun must have a very specific niche is a bit of a problem, because it means that we're going to have optimal designs very quickly and it'll be pretty boring. Should have learned from Freelancer's modding community, where at least a couple of mods got the problems of broad balance yet different effects ironed out.
The description of the Campaign is especially troubling; in a word, it's boring. Been there, done that, get a new storyline. Whoever's in charge of that should be put in charge of something else.
I'm also pretty worried about the modding for the engine; from what's been described thus far, trying to build a working ship for this game (presuming that the barriers to entry for merely importing content aren't ridiculous, like, say, requiring models to be exported via the 3DS pipeline only) is still going to be very difficult to do. Building ships that are functional, because of the overly-complex thruster system, sounds more painful than fun. However, we'll just have to see how clean their thruster-control system is and how much fudge-factor room there is.
Anyhow, I am keeping an eye on the title but I'm more excited about what's happening here, with a much lower budget but a lot more attention being put on core game design and less emphasis on gee-whiz visuals.
