Even People Who Hate Games Will Be Blown Away By How Realistic This One Is

The "next-generation" gaming consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, have been on the market for exactly a year now. So even though they're technically "current-generation," people still have yet to see a game that truly uses the power of these new machines.

Wait no more.

Naughty Dog is one of the premier game developers. Their early games ("Crash Bandicoot," "Jak and Daxter") are iconic, and their more recent games win awards and critical praise. The company's Indiana Jones-esque action-adventure franchise, "Uncharted," falls into this category.

The final game in Naughty Dog's "Uncharted" franchise is coming in 2015, and based on the footage released at The Game Awards in Las Vegas this past weekend, we'll finally get to see what the PlayStation 4 is capable of.

Before you do anything else, watch this gameplay trailer. At least part of it. (As a side note, I showed this footage to my parents over the weekend, both of whom are pretty skeptical of video games. They watched the entire video, and were blown away.)

Here are some notable screengrabs from that trailer:

The level of detail here is stunning. The rippling of the waves, the erosion and moss on the rocks, and the lighting effects on all those surfaces. Even shining a flashlight is more realistic than ever, in its own imperfect way.

If you manage to peel yourself away from that gameplay trailer, take a gander at some of these images taken from PlayStation's hour-long panel on "Uncharted 4," in which the game's artists describe their design choices in terms of the full body, and even details like the folds on his clothing and fabric textures.

As a gaming rig, the PlayStation 4 is vastly superior to the PlayStation 3, and much closer to a true PC: Its processor has 8 cores compared to one, and it has 8X more RAM than the PS3. And even though it's taken a year, we're now just beginning to see what the new console is capable of.

Still, if this is an early build of Naughty Dog's next game, we can't wait to see the final version of "Uncharted 4" when it arrives next year.