why do my landscape and buildings look S$#$T

[Ataros]

It was done to make it run faster on low end PCs as too many people were complaining on this forum.

To turn up the quality:

In video settings put Texture quality on Standard (it is the highest original setting) and Houses detail to High. Make sure you run at least medium landscape shadows.

Increase anisotropic filtering quality and texture filtering in your driver settings. Turn up mip-map detail level in video drivers.

You may also set visibilitydistance=4 in conf.ini iirc. And SSAO in game settings.