Graphics Updates?!?! :O

[Hakuro89]

I think it's probably because
a) The older areas had slight tweaks to things like lighting, as well as when we went from DX9 to DX11
and b) they don't put nearly as much effort into fine detail as they used to in 2.0, making the newer areas fairly lackluster in comparison. You can see that much in the gear they release nowadays- they don't give two sh**s about clipping anymore, and you'd notice if you played a race with a tail, they don't bother adjusting armor to fit around them anymore and just let them clip through the default appearance.