Also, when i’ve made both deconstructing post, i took the screenshots directly from youtube videos.
And as you can see, the 2019 footage looked way lot better and with better quality even when zoomed the screens, than the last footage shown. Most of the pictures i took and zoomed them in got pixeled as hell.
2019: Deconstructing Age of Empires IV Trailers - [piece by piece]
2021: Deconstructing Age of Empires IV Fan Preview Video [Piece by Piece]
In both cases video quality was 4k (i kno youtube 4K is not the best but well, it’s the same condition) and yet the fan preview looks sometimes like if the video itself was in low quality, or the game settings were in low (look at the ground texture quality in all the Delhi Sultanate pictures).
Isegreen said footage was months old but never mentioned about graphics settings of the footage shown. I believe is was at maximum since is what any dev would do.