Well, hard to tell on screenshots. How does the foliage or the umbrellas move in wind, how strong is motion blur and so on...that's all stuff which can change it to the better or worse which you don't see that much on this picture.
But it's probably not a downgrade considering everything and that alone is great nowadays if you compare it to pretty much all other games at release and how they looked one year before,.
They could simply be like "this is not so important let's reduce it but this is important let's make it better" from last year to this year, who knows without really having played both versions.
It's definitely not the most insane upgrade ever, some games changed completely even with art direction and everything and they looked much better after the change.
