Quote Originally Posted by Jagick View Post
How do things look THIS much worse all these years later? Everything is so washed out and faded.
The new engine uses reflective lighting. Like in real life, the colors change depending on the lighting and that's why people think they are washed out.

Textures have so much less detail. The areas seem so much less open and more linear even by other theme park MMO standards. I don't know if 1.0 was on console as well but my immediate suspicion is to wonder of the downgrade was so this game could run on the PS3.
1.0 had extremely high detail in some areas and extremely low detail in others. It was uneven, so some things looked amazing and other things looked terrible. A balance was required, so a new rule was made that everything must be equally as detailed, so they are not as detailed as the best models in 1.0, but they are not as low detail as at the worst models in 1.0. An overall limit on detail of all the assets was required to work on the majority of people's hardware.

If you have an extremely detailed plant pot beside a pixelated tree it doesn't look very good.