As art guru, couldn't you push for this? The EC is more than capable of rendering lush 3D, why the archaic choice to use sprites instead of polygonal mobiles? (Third Dawn was a complete eyesore, but that was due to horrendously low poly counts and low-res textures) You obviously use 3D models to make the sprites, why the added work? If "nostalgia" is somewhere in your answer, it's the wrong answer...
Nope, nostalgia had nothing to do with the choice to go 3D. I had been pushing to go 3d then, and I'm still a supporter now. At this point it's not really a matter of pushing, per se, since just about everyone on the team supports going full 3-D anyway. Moving from the pipeline that we currently have now to something that works with a 3-D client is a colossal undertaking. We would have to develop, support, and maintain both a 2-D and a 3-D art pipeline, not to mention the massive rewriting of code to manage 3-D assets. Most of what we have now what have to be completely rewritten in order to support 3-D.
I'm not implying that this makes the task impossible, but it is a massive, massive undertaking and should be approached with great care and consideration - especially given that the expectation would be that we would support both the classic client and a newly updated 3-D client.
-Grimm
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