While I love the art design, I have an issue with how the entire game looks like concept art.
Character models and monsters are not separated from the background in any way visually, which from a visual design perspective is really bad. The game is visually fatiguing, and after even four hours I feel like I need a really long break.
As an aside, I’m a semi-pro fighting game player who plays video games like 8-10 hours a day with no problem.
There are tons of solutions you could implement to fix this issue, but I suggest an easy fix:
Give all character models and monsters a well-defined black outline. By doing so, you give the eyes an easy way to separate foreground from background, significantly decreasing visual fatigue. Also, a ton of other MMOs/RPGs implement this feature. At least give us the option to have it.
From a programming standpoint, drawing a black outline around your 3D model isn’t hard at all. You can use feature edge rendering techniques such as:
http://www.marctenbosch.com/npr_edges/
http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/EdgesNPAR04/index.html
Or, even easier, you can render the model (textures + cel-shaded) in Blender without outlines, then render camera-space normals to a second target. Then on your second pass, you can do a full-edge detection filter over the normals from the first pass. This means you can automate the process for all of your assets.
