The visuals should be very consistent between machines, BUT monitors have a huge impact on what your eyeballs actually receive. So does ambient lighting around your monitor.
The graphics cards and OSes are all extremely consistent in what they render, and if you take a screenshot, it will look "the same" between machines. But even just taking that screenshot and showing it to you on one monitor versus another gives a really different feel.
My main work machine is a laptop that I sometimes work of, and sometimes hook up to a giant HDR TV. There are some space backgrounds that on my laptop screen look basically black as a background, but have a really rich and varied set of dark reds on the TV. If there's a lot of ambient light around my laptop where I'm at at the time, then the problem gets even worse.
There are a couple of different ways that lighting and color can be overwhelming:
1. The first is too much contrast, with really dark darks, and really bright brights. That's the problem that this game has had for a while. On my HDR TV, that actually looks pretty glorious since it has a much higher range of color draws and so the darks are visible but subtle, and the brights don't feel like they sear into my retinas. But on my laptop, it looks like just blackness with giant searing lights in there. If I was sitting in a dark room in particular, then the searing brights would be incredibly painful I imagine.
2. The second is not ENOUGH contrast, where there's just a riot of colors and motion, and everything is in kind of a middle-ground with no sense of color grading. This bothers a lot fewer people and doesn't tend to cause pain, but can cause motion sickness or eye fatigue or similar. This is something the first game had big problems with, since it was something that I developed on much older hardware (monitors and otherwise), and so the colors tend to be pretty bright and in a similar range in order to avoid issues of things being too dark on the monitors I had at the time. What that means is that the first game actually looks kind of grayish instead of black on my HDR TV now, though, because almost no part of the screen ever goes truly into the darkest part of the color range. This can lead to fatigue trying to read the text in particular, which starts looking like white on a middling blue-gray.
The optimal solution is something that is a bit more modern than #2, without relying on HDR in the way that #1 does. A number of PS4 Pro games actually have HDR and non-HDR modes for different TVs, and I can definitely see why. Bloom and tonemapping work completely differently on the two modes, but if they are on the appropriate hardware then the HDR version gives more richness and color without blowing out the whites/brights. Versus the non-HDR versions look kind of bland and grayish/brownish by comparison on an HDR TV. On the flip side, if you were able to turn on the HDR mode on a non-HDR TV, you'd get searing eye pain, be unable to see a lot of things that were too dark, and have large parts of the TV that were just rounded up to white.
The difference is how many colors can be shown on the screen in a way that we can see, and it's a relatively recent issue. Before HDR there was still a wide range of brightnesses and contrasts on TVs, but there weren't entire color ranges that could look different depending on the type of monitor or TV you use.
Anyway, so I've been using my laptop screen as a re-grade the color here. This will be more consistent for more people, and should look good and not be eye-searing for anyone. My laptop screen actually has a really good color range (compared to my older monitors) despite not being HDR, and so AI War 1 looks washed out and bland on it as well. The new look that I'm shooting for keeps enough range that I can see a full range of colors on my laptop screen, but without blowing out the brights or having lots of stuff trend to darkness too much.
Incidentally, even on the HDR TV the darks were too dark in the main, and the brights too bright. Some of that was just some drift over time as various parts of the engine and post processing stack were upgraded and things changed without me noticing. So even in the best case, the lighting was definitely off in this game.
What this will mean is that on most machines it should look really good now, and on HDR screens it will look a bit washed out but still not old school.
Hopefully this does answer some of the questions here, though.
