Well yeah, basically everything stays the same, it is just a far higher resolution.. This is the change all UO players want, we don't want anymore "GRAPHICS OVERHAUL" We just want a higher resolution..
So there's a couple of things about the same, just higher resolution world art:
1) It would all have to be hand painted, and although our artists are capable, we're talking about hand painting thousands of pieces of artwork. The scope is huge- especially given the fact that the art team is tasked up to our eyeballs on any given day.
2) The Legacy client doesn't have a means of scaling tileart assets. Meaning that the resolution you create the art at is how it shows up in the world. So if you doubled the resolution of a cactus, in game you get a cactus that's twice as big!
One thing that we've learned from UOKR world art creation is that we have to make 3D art from a 2D art perspective. This isn't as easy as this sounds. You see, modern game artists are used to doing things to scale with the world environment. For example, if they wanted to make a brick wall, you would want to make sure that the bricks in the texture are sized correctly in relationship to the player. This is because in more modern 3D games, not scaling things properly makes them look ... well, stupid. But when you are creating 2D art, you paint them so that the texture can be interpreted correctly, not so that it's necessarily to scale. There's also the disconnect between things looking correct in 3D, and once they've been rendered out in the UO perspective, they look odd due to UO's military orthographic perspective. So the result is that you end up having to make some things look "wrong" in 3D so that they look "right" in an orthographic perspective.
... oh, that's where I left my can of worms. I wonder what's inside???
-GO