It's pretty clear what i'm suggesting. The distance haze is all over the game and makes it look washed out. Simple as that.
I don't think that's an artistic choice because there's no way they would choose to make it look as bad. I'm sure it's just a means to hide distant small details and textures for performance reasons. Yes it's open world which means it has to render more things at a time, which means it also has to do some visual sacrifices in order to do so. Thus this looks like an optimization and not an artistic choice.
MK8 looks great because of it's intense colors, nice contrast and dense detail. MKW looks hazy, emptier and more washed out in comparison. All because it had to be open world. How is this not obvious to you, it's not the first time an open world game has to look worse than a linear one, this was always the case in the near past. The console is still not powerful enough to have visual parity or diminishing returns between these two types of games.
When the game gets emulated there will be a way to get rid of the heavy fog/haze and you will see how much better the game will look because of that and how this is not an artistic choice.