Just the same problem Polyphony had with GT5/6 where they had to reuse old PS2 assets and models because they don't want to get help from outsourcing companies. Their track modeling team is great and very talented, it's just the amount of work that goes into the graphical fidelity in modern games take so much time and effort that it's impossible to keep all of the tracks more graphically consistent with each other without having outsourcing help (which is cheaper than hiring new full time employees + these outsource companies have literally 1000s of artists dedicated to just creating art assets). Pretty sure 99% of modern AAA game developers use outsource companies for development help in addition to the Forza and Project Cars devs.
So when Polyphony try to do all of the art themselves, they only have a very limited number of people and time to focus on high fidelity art graphics for only a select amount of tracks or objects, and in order to meet their release deadline (even with a 4-5 years dev time) they have to reuse old art assets or slightly touch them up to make the game have more content. Or they release a game without much content despite a 4 year dev time (GTSport) and still be graphically inconsistent because they had to rush new tracks like Alsace, which looks like they just quickly made in an internal procedural track creator. That's why Spa in GTSport is using the same building models as the ones in GT5/6 even with that long gap between the games. They could have outsourced those buildings and got better looking ones but Kaz doesn't like to outsource for some reason.
Those buildings don't even really bother me graphically, and LeMans in GTSport is easily the best looking version out of the other racing games even if some buildings might not have as much detail.
But it's the ugly tracks like Alsace where you see the limit of Polyphony trying to do everything in-house and it makes me question why they don't just outsourced their fictional track props and art to a cheap third party company. I can see why for real track circuits where Polyphony wants to make everything themselves to be as accurate as possible, but that's not required for the fictional tracks. And with 3d photogrammetry scanning objects and props, there's not even much artistic talent involved in that, it would look the same as if Polyphony made the objects using photogrammetry.
You can read about how outsource companies have become highly important in modern game productions here:
https://theoutline.com/post/3087/ou...e-in-china-horizon-zero-dawn?zd=1&zi=i6sx52v2
Hong Kong in GT4 still looks incredible, but it's mostly just 2D photos used as textures and was much easier to make. I can't see Polyphony having 6-7 city tracks again with modern graphics unless Kaz allows for outsourcing help. At least he started budging for the car model outsourcing after the huge content backlash GTSport had.
at the end of the days these are games and will always have to cut some corners. Again though what game actually shows you the track highlights like GTS?
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