Shogun 2 Total War - confirmed

[caravel]

You know, they really were not. I was Googling some info about STW and I came across quite a few reviews from the time; they all ding STW for sub-standard graphics. I guess STW's 2D sprites weren't as pretty as, I dunno, Starcraft's 2D sprites.

STWs 2D sprites were used on an open 3D battle map. When sprites are scaling up and down (i.e. when you go zooming in) they look pretty poor, unless they're multi framed high res. The best sprites were the MTW infantry sprites (cavalry sprites were the wrong scale and looked even worse than the STW sprites). In a nutshell you can't really compare a 2D RTS/TBS to a 3D STW, because at that time 3D was not as polished as it is now due to graphics card limitation of the time (i.e. Voodoo3, ATI Rage and Nvidia TNT2, etc).