Honestly, the visuals were fine. The road read clearly, enemies stood out, resources didn't look like debris — functionally everything worked. It just wasn't anything to look at.
And I wanted it to be. I wanted the frame to be worth something on its own: for the wasteland to feel like a place you're actually driving through, not a backdrop a train sprite slides across. For the atmosphere to come through — scorched earth, rusted hulks, a few lights in the dark (a day/night cycle is a problem for future me) — instead of a set of legible icons.
What bothered me most was how mismatched it all was. Objects on the map looked like they'd been carried in from different games: the ground its own thing, the wrecks another, event points just icons sitting on top of everything. Each one lit from somewhere in its own world. So the main change is that everything now stands under the same sun. Props, wrecks, shelters, evacuation pads — solid objects, lit the same way, with real shadows and a sense of how tall they are. And the ground stopped being one texture stretched to the horizon: sand, gravel and broken asphalt finally look like different surfaces.
Wheel tracks stay in the dirt. Shove a barrel and it rolls off, leaving a furrow behind it. While your crew strips a fuel tanker, it turns before your eyes from a clean, intact machine into the same junk as everything else around it. Take the people out of a shelter and it doesn't vanish — it just stays there, fading. Small things, but a sense of place is made of exactly those.
None of this really changes how the game plays. It just means I enjoy looking at it now — and that, I think, was worth the time.
P.S. Map objects also got interactive prompts along the way — and a pile of bugs got fixed.