Haha, I just logged in for the forst time in a while and I see this too. I don't know about other places, but it was particularly trippy in some part of Duvercrune. The rocks change appearance with the position of the camera, they can become shiny, or transparent depending on the angle and distance... Weird.

Also, now my game is stuck at 47 fps, no more, no less. Checked in-game and nVidia settings, nothing. It just is...  >.>

Over 400 likes and not even a speck of aknowledgement of the issue.

That's probably the most frustrating part of it all. Considering it has been the most obvious graphical issue for over one and a half years(!). :/

It reminds me one game that starts with Cyberpunk and ends with 2077

Here´s to more people upvoting in 2023 and showing PA that they are deliberately ruining their own game .

It is actually astonishing how much worse this game looks now compared to years ago, and how the graphics quality seems to deteriorate further with every major update the game receives.  BDO's engine has always had issues with pop-in and optimization, but this is on a whole other level.

I returned to BDO for a fresh start on a season character this past October, after not playing for 2-3 years.  I've been enjoying the game, but despite playing on a much more powerful system than I had before, one of the first things I noticed was just how awful everything looks.  I had to double and triple-check my graphics options to make sure that everything was set correctly.  Very High, Remastered, Ultra, faraway object detail, optimization and low power settings; it doesn't matter what options you use and how powerful your hardware is, you cannot overcome the limits set within the engine itself. 

Here is a section of a screenshot I just took outside of Velia while doing the new year's quest that illustrates many of these problems.  At a medium distance, buildings, rocks and cliff faces decay into blocky and pixellated chunks that would quite literally look dated 15 years ago (A).  Beyond that there is a very sharp line where trees and objects stop spawning entirely, and the terrain develops a smeared patchwork pattern resembling a child's finger-painting (B).  You can see just how harsh and jarring this object cutoff is by riding a balloon or climbing a mountain to look down on a forested landscape, as others have shown in this thread.  Further still, distant mountains and islands are entirely barren and lifeless, like a post-apocalyptic landscape (C).  This is on remastered with everything set to favor visuals over performance.  Moving up to ultra alleviates A slightly, at the cost of more than half your frames, but B and C look just as terrible as on any other setting.

My copium for all of this was "at least things still look good up close", but a patch about a month ago broke ground textures as well, and now many areas in the game are blocky and pixellated even when standing right on top of them.  Others have posted good examples of this over the last couple of pages in this thread, but just as with the LOD issues, there's no fix in sight.  At this point I'm starting to worry that with the next landmass they add, and the inevitable visual downgrade that comes along with it as the game engine creaks and shudders under the weight of everything, we're all going to login and see Minecraft characters starting back at us with big square eyes on the character selection screen.

In all seriousness though, this looks awful and is completely unacceptable.  I get that a lot of players just game on optimization mode for PvP or whatever, but visual quality had previously been one of BDO's main selling points, and now it is one of the game's most glaring flaws.  How this hasn't gotten so much as an acknowledgement from Pearl Abyss is beyond me.

It's crazy PA doesn't seem interested in fixing or acknowledging these graphical issues. BDO used to pride itself as one of the best looking MMOs. I guess the apathy at PA is strong these days. Look how bad this looks lol.

This is max remastered, no FSR.

That looks awful.  Velia makes an especially bad first impression for new and returning players.

I found an old screenshot I took when I played in late 2019 and tried to recreate it at the same spot and time of day.  This was the result:

2019

2023

It was hardly perfect back then, with some compromises and low-res textures in the distance, but wow does it ever look gorgeous compared to the disaster that we have now.  It looks like my character is sitting just outside the blast radius of a massive bomb that decimated every living thing to the horizon.  Beyond a certain distance, even the grass did not survive.

Again, this is with all settings favoring visuals over performance.  The 2023 picture is actually higher resolution (4k vs 1440p), though you certainly couldn't tell by looking at it.  Even the tree shadows in the foreground are less detailed now. 

There is nothing you can do to fix this, including playing on Ultra.  This game looks like a hot mess compared only with itself from 3 years ago, and that's something I've literally never seen in any other game I've played.  Games are supposed to improve visually over time, or at the very least not degrade to this extent. 

I'm guessing PAs thought process is "most people play on potato graphics since damage is tied to frame rate lol, so nobody will notice if we cut some corners here.  And another corner here.  And there.  And over there too.  Maybe here also?"  Well this thread shows that quite a few people have noticed, so at the very least they should dignify us with some sort of response or acknowledgement of this problem.

Somehow it just keeps getting worse. I have to struggle to find a spot where the actual terrain shows up, if I wanna grab a screenshot. Cus most of the time it's just assets floating and 1994 texture resolution. I could, of course, try to zoom in on the amount of skin the new outfits are revealing and just ignore the potentially pretty scenery, but then I'd have to deal with the clipping issues and, sometimes, the lo-res textures used on them...

Here's my contribution.  Could be a new carpet design, though.