I don't know if it's the programing, CPU, GPU, netcode or what, all I know is the new Frostbite engine is not a pretty as the last games. This game suffers poor graphics quality throughout.
The bird comparison was meant to be humorous. I agree that map design is more important than graphics.
Upgrading Battlefield's Frostbite game engine to take advantage of solid state drives would bring huge improvements to graphics and level design. DICE could stream in assets off the SSD instead of the current situation where they have a limit on how many assets they can place in a map due to limited storage space in RAM.
I was excited when I heard 2042 was going to have 128 player multiplayer. I imagined great looking maps with lots of vehicles everywhere. Instead we got big empty maps with very few vehicles due to a limit on how many assets and vehicles can fit into RAM.
I also don't understand what it is about Battlefield's destructible buildings that limit map design so much. Don't get me wrong I love destruction in Battlefield, but all the buildings in Battlefield usually look the same. When you walk inside there's hardly any furniture or decorations. It would be nice to have more variety when it comes to buildings in Battlefield.
Maybe SSD streaming could solve these issues. I don't think that will happen until EA stops making Battlefield games on older generation consoles with 5,400 RPM hard drives.
@OskooI_007All are good points. I seem to remember a video/post early on after launch where someone was looking at one of the bolts in the floor on Orbital, and they were showing the art design of it and how many polys/vertices it had and were emphasizing that the effort that was taken to make these bolts was large including the amount of it that needed to render for something that could have just been a texture. Multiply that one bolt to dozens/hundreds in a location and you have a performance optimization issue.
I too was initially (cautiously) optimistic at the premise of a 128 player map, but when you saw all of the limitations that were found (as you and @Lady_One mentioned the empty rooms/buildings/lack of clutter) it felt so lifeless. There were "houses" in the desert that at most had a ladder in them. Office area with maybe a single desk.
TL;DR, in agreement, technically the game is ahead of the other games of the series. But the design and the limitations that those design decisions caused (as well as the pivot from a BR to "normal" battlefield title, covid, etc) it led to needing to focus on other areas and getting these maps/game types/etc shipped before it would have ideally been playtested and ready.
edit: found a reddit thread discussing what I mentioned --
https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield2042/comments/utgnxi/bf2042_has_insane_amounts_of_unnecessary/
Obvious grain of salt in either case, and there's arguments in the thread discussing the methods and their pros/* [the initial OP+imgur link was deleted, but the content of the thread is still there discussing].
So it's possible that the extra details in the small objects are not affecting the performance, but it doesn't answer why the levels were so sterile otherwise outside of just not having the time to design levels/maps that felt "lived in".
