It might need a bigger effort in terms of artistic choice and design but its not outside of spiderweb's capabilities, for example I always found the top down games more beautiful and artistically pleasing. Never liked Avernum isometric graphics, one explanation is that if you cannot achieve the resource demanding realistic graphics that are up to today's standards, one should try to make a more abstract graphical version and not try to do something in between the two. For example, Terraria, Cogmind, Brogue....etc all have minimalistic graphics that are good from an artistic viewpoint.