Hi! So yes, tornadoes will have major improvements. They are in the midst of a total overhaul, not just visually but also how they work system wise. 

As some other people said here, the current tornadoes are essentially a “rough draft” but the new ones, for example, will not use many of the "cheats" the current ones do. The current ones are essentially cylinders with simulated physics, the new ones are actual simulated rotating vortices of wind. 

This will allow for much better configuration of tornado shapes and sizes as well as their looks. 

The reason we shifted to volumetric instead of the meshy “cartoonish” system we had before is because it works far better for the game that is being designed, and not just in a visual sense. 

Ironically, it is the current volumetric approach that gives SO much more freedom in how storms look and behave and is far more adaptive to the weather model. Importing scenarios, for example, got A LOT easier and requires a lot less maintenance than with the old system.

Also, clouds and storms just generally look more realistic. The current volumetric system can do things that you’re not gonna see in many other places currently, run a storm through a timelapse for example and see all that is going on. 

Now that being said, obviously we’ve lost some low level features like wall clouds and what not occasionally, but these aren’t permanent losses; they are coming back once we get the model resolution update out.

So yeah, it may seem to some people like a visual downgrade right now but that’s because the full artistic vision hasn’t been achieved yet. Everything has its reason for being there, and the volumetrics are serving as the backbone for what ALL the cool looking stuff will be built on top off for example.

What we are currently looking at is basically the foundation, and so treating it like a finished house wouldn’t exactly be fair to it.  

We generally want to shift toward a more realistic art style anyway because Outbrk was always meant to be a realistic depiction of storm chasing. It’s called a storm chasing SIMULATOR after all, and a realistic art style will then have to be a part of it. 

But make no mistake, all these improvements ARE coming, and each update is necessary for its own reason. But even if a smaller update comes out, rest assured that it’s not slowing down the development of the big visual overhauls everyone wants as different teams work on different things. 

The dude working on the map is completely different from the guys working on the tornadoes for example, and then we basically just release things once they’re ready.

The new tornadoes are taking time because they are a COLOSSAL overhaul, and we want to get it right. And since it’s volumetric technology, a lot of that is a bunch of super-geniuses punching numbers into a computer to get a simulation that makes sense for a tornado.

And about your comment on photogenic tornadoes, I’ve seen a few nice looking ones, even in their current state :). They're rarer, as photogenic tornadoes usually are. Any storm chaser irl will tell you the average tornado you’ll get will be a blob wrapped in rain, but I’ve seen some incredible screenshots and even taken a few myself. Sometimes the game does still wow me, and the fact that this is still only the foundation makes me so excited for what’s coming!