This isn't 2005 anymore.
The development of engine graphics has mostly stalled. We can't refer to TW1/TW2 anymore, where each iteration would look better than the last.
The reason? Consoles (and most PCs) don't have the required horsepower to run the game at a high level of visual fidelity. This is simply a result of the current architecture reaching its limits. Each iteration of GPUs released every year are only slightly more powerful, but not enough to make a significant leap in graphical processing.
Game devs have all the tools nowadays to make the game look as good as possible. You've seen those graphics in VGX and SoD trailers. Early builds already look like they'd melt whatever GPU you'd throw at them.
So, the direction has shifted. Instead of making a game look better on every iteration, we start from the top, then downgrade until the game can be run reliably on consoles and PCs.
What we're seeing nowadays are game companies taking advantage of this: they advertise their game with unreachable graphical fidelity for the current tech (TW3, EA Battlefront, Watch Dogs, etc.) then decide to downgrade the game along the way, "optimizing" the game until it runs at 30fps. This has now become common practice.
But it's not right. I don't care for the argument of "art style changes throughout development". It obviously does change to an extent. But here, rather than seeing art style modifications, we're seeing the game being heavily downgraded on a technical level. Whether it's the lighting, the foliage, the textures, the assets, the tessellation, the draw distance (in the case of TW3), etc. If you choose to advertise your game one way and make promises along the way, then you better know what you're getting into. Otherwise, it's 100% fraudulent marketing and nothing else.