I'm pretty sure vanilla game levels being generic is intentional. They are supposed to pass as places you can find all over the world map, so it's not too jarring when you travel for thousands of kilometers in story modes, yet keep fighting on the same limited number of arenas. Levels can't look too specific for that purpose.
I don't know if that's a more likely explanation than it just being a product of rushed, uninspired design, but it's certainly possible--and of course the two possibilities aren't exactly mutually exclusive. But to whatever extent this was an intentional design choice, it would be just one more in a massive series of poor choices when it comes to this game and prioritizing those awful single player modes, themselves devoid of originality, depth, focus, and immersiveness and heavy on tedium.
I have an 7 years-old PC and SC6 runs smoothly on decent settings except for Astral Fissure stage variations (which are story modes only). Looks pretty well optimised from here.
Yeah, but 1) PC is the smallest of the three principle platforms of this game in terms of market share, by a significant margin, and 2) when we are talking about optimization, we are not just talking about the framerate and frame drops for play--in that respect, SCVI is an imperfect game but not really that far below the industry standard for 3D fighters made at the end of this generation, though only by virtue of sacrificing asset fidelity (particularly stage elements) on the console versions--but also about resolution, match load times, menu load times, texture pop-ins, menu stutters, selection confirm delays, and all manner of other bugs and issues.
Utilizing even the character select menu on PS4 or XBOX One can be a chore, especially if you are selecting a custom design from the submenu, and you almost never see the characters load on the splash screen but for the last couple of seconds!Or consider CaS itself: even on fairly decent PCs, there's a noticeable-verging-on-pretty-obnoxious wait whenever you make certain types of changes to the model, and its truly terrible on console. The whole game is just loaded with these little moments where you can feel the wheels grinding, so to speak--pretty much throughout every aspect of the experience.
No one thing is exactly intolerable, but my point is that when you consider that the game also doesn't push the limits of what the consoles are capable of in terms of graphical performance, it becomes additional reason to recognize that the game is just not very well tuned when it comes to the hardware it primarily runs on, as a statistical matter. And honestly, there also just bad optimization choices: for example, I'd suffer through even much more lengthy load times if it meant getting some backdrops that didn't make me feel like I'm suffering from degenerative lens disease of some form or another, they are so out-of-focus and blurry. But presumably that's not possible because it also would create frame dips in play which is (reasonably) considered a bigger problem. But notice that Tekken 7 is able to strike a far superior overall quality of these two competing elements: that's the value of a bigger team of coders working at the front end of production to optimize things.
It will be interesting to see whether Namco decides to develop a new version of the game optimized to take advantage of the superior processing and GPUs of the PS5 and XBOX-S/X, rather than just the same build, more or less. I would be surprised to see a truly optimized version for the new hardware, but such a version could, theoretically, remedy most of the issues discussed above. Actually, some of them will be improved merely by the better hardware, but plenty will not.
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