Look how cool you are using the excuse "I don't care" to avoid backing up your purported knowledge of chemistry!
H2O will always behave like H2O, so yes, definition of water. L2 chemical and physical properties. Rapids still have reflections when you get up close, and since it's up close, I can't see why it looks like a matte, translucent object. Both of you are stretching it. Most of what we saw weren't rapids but fairly gentle waves. If those were supposed to be rapids then they have some work to do...but it is an alpha so not much to say at this point. The only instances of matte water I can think of are the actual white caps, ice that has a jagged surface on the very small scale, ice with bubbles in it, ice with dirt or some other particulate in it (particularly on the surface), steam, or water that's been supersaturated with a solute. Aside from the last one, none of those are actually matte but just so small in their reflections that you can't discern anything other than the brightest source of light shining off of it merging together to form one colour, and otherwise scatter any light trying to pass through it. Also note that most of them are frozen. Did that water look frozen to you? Did that water look like a vapour to you? Did it look supersaturated? If you know something that I don't, then I pray thee tell.
So yes, your statements are still invalid. I said it and I'll say it again: small things like this take away from the experience. A game can be fun, but when one runs across a particularly heinous texture or a badly proportioned NPC, often one will pause and go "wow, they could have done that better" or "really now, an extra day of production would be worth it to make this worth it." Not sure about you, but I'd rather have flat water that looks like water than a bunch of tris that don't.
On a somewhat related note, I wonder if they'll make it such that you can crouch in a deep enough source of water or hide in foliage to actually fool the AI and set an ambush. I get tired of games where I know that there is no way in hell that my signature is visible against the environment unless I move, yet they still shoot at me anyways with frightening accuracy.
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