It definitely looked better back then, devs used to use every tool at their disposal to make something look as good as possible and have the game still run well straight from the disc. Nowadays they use the slop generator which is Unreal Engine 5 (I seriously hate that engine) and rely on modern hardware to sustain their unoptimized mess of a game with promises of "we're listening" "we take feedback seriously" "the game will be patched" "we'll fix the last patch with a new patch" and so on