the shadows themselves look pretty bad, but the lighting/shaders/atmosphere/customizable environments are pretty nice. honestly i don't care about the jagged shadow edges, and i appreciate the features as they are now---i mean remember back to map days when you had to make a totally new map just to change the parameters? like snowing/time of day/etc.
there is something i miss about maps though. they were a super-efficient way to have a huge detailed space, people tend to say they were stufftily designed/whatever but even those HUGE full house maps with tons of detail ran ok for me on a crappy laptop. i think removing maps, ultimately, was a huge kick in the face to blockland. some features are trade-off, and some are better, but the accessibility of loading a map and launching a server can't be matched by modter
