In 2009 with VU10.0 the new Cryengine CE2 was implemented, which is the engine still being used today.
It came with a minimum standard set of "eye candy", but CE2's potential didn't got utilized further.
In comparison to other online games the first two years after CE2 implementation, PE visually looked quite nice and beautiful, even though it was obvious how few of the CE2 engine's possibilities got utilized.
We all have played Crysis and we all knew what CryEngine2 was capable of and what could have been possible for PE, if CE2 only would have been utilized better.
But sadly MA needed those two years after implementation of CE2 to fix (some of) the hundreds of bugs they implemented with the new engine.
Visuals are one thing, but collisions, pathfinding, stuck mobs and players, crashes to desktop, user interface-server synchronisation, falling trough the ground, glitches, and another dozens of abusable or frustrating bugs made the game more or less unplayable during this time (depending on the stress acceptance and frustration resistance of the player).
But for a 10 - 1000 US$ per month online game they were unacceptable. Hundreds of big whales left the game, cashed out and the drain of cash crashed the ingame markets and led to MindArk bankruptcy, which only got evaded with questionalbe financial stunts.
After those two years the hay-wired patch-humunculus learned to find his feet, but the visual advantage over other online games was lost.
Now, in year 13 after the CE2 implementation we still fall through some floors, half of the instances are closed down, mobs, vehicles and players still run into trees and get stuck, collisions don't work, vehicles can't be spawned on even ground, game mechanics don't work and 90% of the CE2 visual potential is still unused.
I hope UE5 will solve more bugs than it will cause.
I empirically fear MindArk's competence.