Well, yes, I agree with you that today's difference is nothing compared to what we suffered going from Icewind Dale to Neverwinter Nights. Twenty years ago (fuck, we are old), it was like going from a refined delicious dish to a plate full of dirt, while today 2d backgrounds are something like a very expensive meal at a 3-star restaurant, while 3d ones are a very good lunch at your Italian grandmother's house: maybe it's not as refined, but I am still fine with eating there for the rest of my life.Take any single area in Deadfire and any single area in Kingmaker, ignoring assets reuse (we are looking at a single area, after all). The Deadfire one will always look a thousand times better.
First four Kingmaker screenshots I found on Google:
The same thing, but for Deadfire:
I mean, come on. Look at a single column in a Kingmaker screenshot and then do the same in a Deadfire one.
I agree with you that it's a function of time and effort, but those two things are a function of the same resource: money. With infinite money, Wrath of the Righteous could look better than Deadfire, but money is always finite and Owlcat will never be able to reach the same level of detail Obsidian did, because they need to make low-detail reusable assets that needs to be viewable from any angle (a sculpture), while in Deadfire you have a fixed image that you can look at only in a single way (a painting). Again, take a brick from a Kingmaker screenshot and compare it to one from Deadfire: not only they don't feel unique because they have to be reused, they also are simply uglier, because the same level of detail is unattainable in 3d without a huge investment of resources.
I think we're largely in agreement (and I'm sorry I didn't clock your scuplture/painting analogy in my response, of course you're right and it's very apt - in fact one might almost say it's the time difference between having to paint all sides of a thing vs just one side of a thing!). Shadows and the luxury of more shadow complexity at no performance hit also has a lot to do with it too.
But I still maintain that the trade-off point isn't unpleasant to make nowadays (not as it was with, say, NWN vs. BGII). For example if you look at the building on the bottom left in the last picture, it's not really that far off something from D:OS2. The main charm is in the more-bespoke nature of the environments in the isometric games.
And as to convergence, I'd say that the 3-d games now look as good as, if not better than, many of the environments from the first BG - again, it's partly a function of resolution. If you zoom in on the ground in PFK, it's like 512x512 or whatever, and in the original game the NPCs are somewhat of a similar resolution. But if you get the high rez 2048x2048 NPC texture pack (same rez as one's characters), it's quite a noticeable difference looking at the NPCs zoomed out, they're more "jewelline." If you could have the same resolution for ground textures and building textures, then the convergence would be even closer.
D:OS 2 is beautiful to look at, my only gripe with it is that the cartoonish look doesn't really work for me.
