>>5855946090% of the work here is being done by the lighting and the reason they're allowed to put more into said lighting is because these are tiny areas that are loaded individually.
the reason the wild area and SV look like ass by comparison is that they're not allowed to build the game out of dioramas
it's the exact thing that happened to monster hunter, where the newer games have bigger areas that looking as striking because it's much harder to bake lighting into a big continuous area vs. smaller rooms connected by a series of hallway loading screens even if the graphical fidelity is otherwise turned up
