Screenshots do a poor job communicating what goes on visually.
What I see much more now is the terrain detail changing in quality at a closer distance than before. This is far more apparent while the sim is in motion, because you see it happening, which is jarring, I tried to illustrate this with two screenshots where I marked up the textures in hillsides. Again, screenshots do a poor job illustrating the abruptness of the texture change as the aircraft moves forward.
I posted one looking out the cockpit window of the A320neo at a KSFO gate and the trucks have poor texture detail just a few meters away. I know they had higher quality texture detail before.
I posted a screenshot of elongated spike/pyramid buildings on approach to KPHX.
None of these were zoomed or using any other sort of method to illustrate my point — they were just looking out the window of the aircraft from the cockpit.
I loaded into the Velocopter at S50 Auburn Municipal just SE of KSEA. I wanted to fly into Seattle and see what the helicopter experience might be like for this pending release version. Looking out the window from where it spawned me the entire terrain and buildings are a psychadelic melted mess. They continued to be so as I flew away from the airport. Downtown Seattle looked very poor and The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle is a POI and it was a melted blob — even at a distance, so I tried to get closer to make sense of what I was seeing.
Yes, yes, I know that the sim struggles with low altitude detail, I am fully aware of that fact, but this is far worse than what I’ve seen in the past. I flew the Velocopter, when it was released, all over my small semi-rural town and it looked nothing like this. The buildings were defined and there was minimal melty weirdness with objects. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but it was not like those screenshots, at all.
There is a thread here regarding melted buildings where the solution for the OP’s issues was to increase LOD to solve the melting. It got me thinking that the current Xbox LOD setting is, therefore, probably responsible for the melted state of these terrain/buildings around Seattle. I don’t know, though, since I can’t see the actual settings they’ve given us.