Yeah Keith's art belongs in Veeshans temple.
That said wow has a lot of cookiecutter copy-paste. But they are thematically mostly consistent. And burried in it is the occasional Vista or cool sky box. Or something neat. Void elf starting home (city, errr asteroids). Eternal palace. Vashjir. Deepholm. Looking out over Azeroth as it rotates from the Vindicar.
EQ could be better with stuff like this, it pulls it off a little bit with the combine empire's architecture, GoD, and Cazic Thule. But it's probably hard to find artists willing and able to work within the constraints of their engine. Dev tools, which are probably totally insane at this point and really do need to be retired.
Doubt they'll pull their heads out of their asses for EQ3 tho. Unless the find some genuis savant who gets that it's not about polys and targeting rings.
I saw some cool stuff in The Darkend Sea, but all those guys probably moved on or got burned out, quit.
I think ironically the focus originally in EQ was less some artistic thing and more like holy shit we can actually make a brick wall texture so it was more about texture and the world and the worlds elements. There was no need or desire for it to fit a product. It was fine to mash stuff together into something that told the story it didn't have to be... like this perfect trail of breadcrumbs designed to engage a poor person through a skinner box X # of hours. Balance was mostly irrelevant...like holy hell auto attack works, and necro and druids devs had permission to just be OP and everyone set their challenge individually without overly obsessing of fairness, so rathe mnts didn't need to be fair for everyone and every class with a static spawn, like the silly Ettin in Stormsong. Which just doesn't hold a candle to Rathe Mnts.
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