Again, as far as I’m concerned, it looked bad at the time. I wasn’t even comparing against the cutting edge at the time, but rather, cutting edge from 2001 (MGS1). This was the same developer (though probably not the same team) that successfully released Mass Effect two years earlier, and backed by the resources of EA as their publisher. These were not technical or budgetary limits, it wasn’t a small game out on the fringes of the market.

Again, it wasn’t a matter of technical capabilities, ie. polygon count, texture resolution, or light rendering. So again, as far as I’m concerned (ie. in my subjective opinion) it looked terrible even at the time. Hence my saying at the time.