I mean, it’s a very nice looking game, which may have something to do with it having about ten times the budget of your average game from a major publisher (the term AAA is now entirely meaningless and I refuse to use it without clarification). Guessing that helps.

I’m not sure “clean and sharp” is a positive value, though. This becomes a problem because I don’t know what people mean, and people often don’t know what they mean, either. Good picture quality doesn’t need to be “sharp”. Things that are in focus realistically aren’t impossibly pin-sharp, that’s a videogamey thing. Shadows definitely aren’t ever sharp. And of course the picture you presented is anything but sharp, since it’s… well, a pretty low-quality 1080p image, so the trees are blobs, the hair is a grainy mess and distant models are blobby.

OK, here’s a true fact I would think is common knowledge but it may not be: A slightly older game on higher settings often looks better than a newer game on lower settings. Remedial performance options are often very compromised and not really meant to be used. Expensive features can look bad on minimum settings and newer games can be built around more expensive stuff and look off when those settings are toggled off. Lower resolution rendering of a better looking image can produce worse results than higher res output for a worse looking image for a number of reasons.

That doesn’t mean newer games look worse, though. It’s just the nature of the beast in PC gaming and it has been for forty years. That’s why it’s always been cool to go back to old games when you update your hardware.