You're missing a few more smileys in there. LOLOLOL amirite. First off, I don't see much advancement since AC1. I see blurry low-res textures, screen tearing and framerate issues, poly-starved character models, low-quality shadows, severe pop-up and fade-in, among other things Those last two for some reason not even the PC ports escape them. Great art and design hides a lot of those issues, but they're there. The overall visual quality has remained about the same since the first game. The only one true, palpable upgrade is the day/night system.
Also, I didn't say it looked bad, I said it looked dated. Reading is fun-damental.
edit: oh right, and now the game has added a really weird SSAO technique that adds strange artifacting around character models when its active.