Its always like this in towns and outposts, There would just be too much for most PC's and GFX cards to handle, rendering high quality Textures for EVERY player in a town or outpost.... get into a party, and leave the town, then look at the rest of the party... they are all high quality....
They do it to save bandwidth, and to save your computer :P
It is annoying, there should be an option to enable/disable this, but yeah, its always like that