Sword of Destiny trailer lighting >>> 2013 screenshots. A lot of the 2013 media is flat as fuck. Where it excels is texture quality and foliage density, Nvidia effects trailer aside. Sword of Destiny trailer showed a massive improvement in lighting.
Anyway, this is what I was talking about, RE: config file tweaks. I've mentioned it a hundred times so I'll try to keep it brief, but explain what might be editable.
In TW2 foliage quality is handled by two variables: the engine, and the assets. The engine handles general draw distance, and thus scaled based on your config settings. LOD transitions unfortunately were baked into assets, meaning config tweaks didn't change LOD pop-in and the only way I could fix it was to go into the editor and tweak every asset individually.
TW3 seems to be quite similar. I suspect eliminating LOD pop-in on foliage wont be possible until the editor rolls around, then we can have a look. But general foliage draw distance might be editable.
FoliageDistanceScale= is the field, and it controls how far foliage is rendered if at the lowest LOD. In TW2 Ultra settings sat it at 1.0, scaling down. However the engine didn't cap it, so you could keep increasing it for real gains. See below.
If TW3 works similarly then this trick will increase detail over distance. The engine and middleware are weird, because of the LOD baked into assets and how it differs between assets. Note in the 1.0 show the low quality bushes render
further than the low quality grass, because each asset has it's own distance variable. 4.0 irons it out, the bushes rendering further,
and the low LOD grass also rendering far, filling in the gaps.
Going by shots and footage TW3 operates similar; LOD varies from asset to asset, leading to some assets rendering their low quality LOD further than others. In theory, this field should unify the two a bit, meaning distance shorelines wont just have low LOD trees, but fill the in between with low LOD grass and bushes too.
And it'll probably come at a significant performance cost too. But hey, let's see!