I really didn't expect too much after the disappointing trailer during the briefing.
But it really was the most impressive, exciting game I have seen during my 3 days full of presentations and hands-on-demos. It reminded me of the first time I used VR (which was actually just this week, too) and how speechless it left me. It's an astounding technical leap. I really, really know that this may sound like hyperbole, I would be sceptical, too, but it's honestly how i feel.
They found some genious ways to visualize this abstract contept of the "cloud".
First, and there has already been some talk about that in this thread, there were bars on the left side of the screen - each bar represented the processing power of 1 Xbox One. It was pretty much always powered out and the more havoc we were wreaking, the more bars appeared (and went away again after we calmed down a little). They kind of used this as a high score system, telling us that the most the dev team got with this demo that day was 14 times the processing power, challenging us to "beat" that.
Additionally, they spoke a little about the server structure: One dedicated sever doesn't seem to be enough to process all of the destruction in the city, so different buildings are actually "located" on different servers. They visualised that by painting the buildings in the colors of their respective server - Buildings on Server 1 were red, Buildings on Server 2 were green etc. They made a building located on one server (red) crash into a building located on another server (green) and showed how it actually changed colour - from red to green, showing that it dynamically switched servers without any noticable lag. That was part of the same demo I was talking about before, the one I got to play myself, and the color-coded buildings were simply activated by the press of a button, so it didn't seem scripted or fake to me.
They aren't talking about the game structure of the multiplayer mode at all yet (I asked if we are able to change from one fully destroyed map to another whenever we want, if it will be reset for everyone at some point etc. but got told they would be talking about that later.) For now they seem to be focused on really showing that the destruction is real and on explaining the difference between SP and MP. I think that's a good decision because I would not have believed any of what they showed me was actually real if they didn't spend quite some time on trying to explain to us how and why it actually works.