I'm weird. Actually most impressive to me is that they nailed the colors. (even if they had to take photos to do it)
Outerra is stunning, but the colors have always been a bit odd. (to me)
Yes. They are using really powerful weapons. 1 M terrain Mesh, terrain texture (i dont know the resolution of the texture, but outerra is using 500m).
So the colors and variety of colors match better with the reality than in outerra.
But still, having all of those advantages (also adding 3d foliage, 3d trees, wind, animals), i think outerra is not even far from how they both look..
Still outerra looks impressive, the images are more clear (less fog if u reduce sccatering). The close up terrain is better (more than 1M with fractals). ETc.
So Outerra just need to add some more things as i said. Foliage, real looking Rocks etc.
But firstly, before add, Outerra need to solve how will build the world. The 30m Mesh will be the great first step. The other should be the world textures.
At the moment using 500m color texture produce a nice results, but not enough for match with the reality. When this main aspect is solved (maybe vectorizing a bigger resolution global color map, lets say 100m), then the result will look similar adding all the foliage details.