He is referring to the Spell Jammer and Planar stuff (both of which includes steampunk elements) stuff that you get exposed to in BG2, which I agree was a little bit of a surprise. Before I was aware of what Spell Jammer (or the Planes) was I thought it was pretty odd too after playing through BG1 which had little of that.
never noticed the steampunk elements, but thinking back, i can see where the OP is coming from. Also the Machine of Lum the Mad? pretty steampunk. the sprites in BG2 were ugly, Elves looked awful. Bards lost their hoods and the shields looked terrible.
He is referring to the Spell Jammer and Planar stuff (both of which includes steampunk elements) stuff that you get exposed to in BG2, which I agree was a little bit of a surprise. Before I was aware of what Spell Jammer (or the Planes) was I thought it was pretty odd too after playing through BG1 which had little of that.
never noticed the steampunk elements, but thinking back, i can see where the OP is coming from. Also the Machine of Lum the Mad? pretty steampunk. the sprites in BG2 were ugly, Elves looked awful. Bards lost their hoods and the shields looked terrible.
Hasn't all Forgotten Realms material become 'steampunked' , then?
Technically, Forgotten Realms are on the prime material plane
I guess there are maybe too often in BG2, since the higher the levels, the more high fantasy - weird contraption - planar stuff you will encounter.
It's not that FR are steampunked, it's that BG2 has more of that element, but it's not that evident.
It certainly did not make me dislike BG2, i love it, i just consider the character art of BG2 not to my liking, worse than the first game.
I do admit however, that i prefer BG1's more "down to earth" atmosphere. A normal-sort of- medieval world. Too much high fantasy and "steampunk" elements usually killed games for me.
The only exception is Planescape:Torment. I hated the graphic direction obviously, but the story was that badass, it made you bypass anything else. Still, in order to play it, i started and dropped it about 5 times.
I can't say that I found BG2 to be "steampunk" at all. The setting definitely had its own flavor which I thought was very appropriate. I can understand preferring one to the other. But wanting them all to be the same seems kind of boring.
And the planar stuff is necessary in my opinion at the power levels present in the second game. Once your a high teens dual classed paragon with emerging god powers it gets kind of hard to challenge you with run of the mill medieval style encounters. There just can't be that many dragons in the woods around a city. What would they eat?
On the one hand, BG 2 has better/expanded animations when it comes to dual wielding. On the other hand, the game comes with some really ugly animations, for example the 2-handed animation. I mean come on, hitting someone in BG 2 with a 2-handed sword either looks like you're almost falling over forward or "just touching your enemy with the tip of your sword". A character with a 2-hander looks so clumsy!
Next item: shields and helmets. No need to discuss about taste in graphics here, I think many many people just prefer the old style way more to the one in BG2 - at this point I have to mention that I don't know how to thank Erephine enough for her great work.
To me the style of BG 1 looked way more mediaeval, brutal and apropriate. The horned helmets / tin helmets (always killed that Flaming Fist guy on the road because of his fricking awesome helmet! "I AM THE LAW" - bam, dead), the armor of a warrior, the casting sounds, the weapon sound effects, the stoned-themed UI - everything was darker, more brutal and did not look like cloth & armor from a faraway country. Call me antiquated - but in "my imagination" shields have to look like the shields in all those well known tales of knights and dragons - and the same goes for helmets, other armor etc.
Oh and by the way - did I mention that it looks absolutely ridiculous how tall and bulky human females in BG 2 are? You just need to compare the Imoen in BG 1 to the Imoen in BG 2: In BG1 she had a fragile but yet gracile body, just as a female thief (with strength 9 if you want) has to look like. But what about her in BG2? Due to the BG2 female (thief or mage) avatar Imoen looks so incredibly bulky, she almost can spit my human male mage on the head! Because of this flaw I always modded her race and appearance to half-elf / elf, in order to spare my eyes that view
Well, what about the Hall of Wonders exhibits, the Halruuan skyship, or the rune-disabling machine in Durlag's Tower? There's plenty of evidence of science, mechanics and a certain localized degree of industrialization in BG1 as well. It may not be in your face as often as in BG2, but then much more of BG1 is spent in very rural areas while BG2 and ToB take you to some pretty far off places.
The style of bg2 is Byzantine, with architectural elements like what you may have found in Florence, or perhaps Constantinople. And the goggles were steam punk? You guys realize they had goggles in the medieval ages, and telescopes, pulleys and siege engines of all types. China had gun powder hundreds of years before it was used in Europe.
Amn is meant to be an incredibly wealthy trading city, not a backwater town such as BG.
There are many misconceptions about art styles and decoration. For example, in medieval times, most wealthy castles were painted and very colorful inside, not dull grey stone.
Steam punk is just junk, it's clear a lot of thought went into the BG2 art style.
Technology has always existed in Faerun. There's an Island ruled by gnome worshippers of Gond that have created, among other things, a functional steam engine as well as firearms. The only reason firearms never became popular was cost and unreliability when compared to magic.
I, too, didn't realise the steampunk element until I actally read this post.
Well, for me the change in direction as far as the artwork is concerned happened mainly to fit the new setting and to complement the feeling of the story and the atmosphere it generates and I have to say it's doing it pretty damn well. I mean at first those wacky shields with their crazy Chtulhu-esque geometry didn't stick too well. Same goes for the scimitars and wakizashis and katanas but as I got to see more of Amn and understand its cultural background (btw the lore found in the random books REALLY helps with this) it felt right and I did like it. My point is that complaining about the look of the plate mail or too much machinery is equal to complaining about the appearance of exotic weapons and that means that what you're really complaining about is the diversity and depth of the world setting - which in this case here is Forgotten Realms.
Dayum. I really wish the developers had just kept the same style, content, aesthetics and medieval technology of BG1 in BG2. As they say, a lack of creative progression is always a good thing!
Seriously though, BG2 is gorgeous. I loved its 'exotic' defiled nature, if you want standard medieval then play BG1 or ... Dragon Age, LOL. That style of medieval RPG is crazy unimaginative, no wonder the developers chose Athkatla as BG2's game city, the city of coin and opportunity!
That's strange, you start of in an area that in some ways resembles Alien 3, with large test tanks with experiments, weird machines and you even have to find a power cell to speak to one of the test subjects.
Talking about animations and paper dolls are besides the point, and doesn't relate to the topic at hand at all.
What about all the stuff in the Temple of Wonders where you meet Alora?
never noticed the steampunk elements, but thinking back, i can see where the OP is coming from. Also the Machine of Lum the Mad? pretty steampunk. the sprites in BG2 were ugly, Elves looked awful. Bards lost their hoods and the shields looked terrible.
Bard sprites were changed in accordance to the addition of chain mail armors. It's one of the faults of BG1 actually. You can throw chain mail on your bards, but because there's no animation for Rogue classes to equip it, he just looked like a default rogue, sort of like a thief/mage trying to wear robes.
Also, the Machine of Lum The Mad has been around since 1e. It's a well-known encounter in D&D worlds.
I feel like Xzar right now. "Montaron, you can be so aggrivating!" Except Montaron can be replaced with people having pre-concieved notions about "steampunk" and how it is "universally bad." Or some such nonsense.
Pretty sure FF6 is one of the most beloved entries into that series, and it was also the one that introduced a "steampunk" element into the saga. Awesome game. Hard to dislike the art in that, with the hand-drawn sprites n such. Fast forward to Dishonored just a few weeks ago. It's actually also not "Steampunk" but has elements of it. It's hauntingly beautiful and full of tons of soul.
It's sort of like when people throw around the term "cyberpunk." Shadowrun was tehnically cyberpunk and was awesome. In a strange way, Warhammer 40k is a cyberpunk spin on your stereotypical fantasy set up. Both are still extremely cool.
I think I'm just going to have to chalk this up to me not understanding the beef and dropping out of this conversation before my head explodes.
Most of the complaints here focus on the paper dolls and the sprites of the playable humanoid races being inferior to BG1. I agree. But I have yet to understand what people mean with the "art style" being inferior, as it can mean essentially anything.
Faerun is, as we know, not a medieval world by any means. Why expect solely medieval influences when playing a fantasy game? The "steampunk" stuff, which isn't seen much apart from certain dungeons, doesn't have anything to do with the everyday life of the regular people of Amn or Athkatla, whose culture has a lot of influences from 16th-century Spain and the Moors (Muslims that once inhabited part of Spain during the middle-ages). I am absolutely in love with how they've portrayed this in the game. Thus, even with no steampunk elements, the general "art style" has to differ alot from BG1.
If BG1 would have quests and dungeons for higher-level characters, they would propably look more like the Planar Sphere or Chateau Irenicus than Durlag's Keep. Alot of things in Faerun differ from your standard medieval fantasy world if you want to be challenged by appropriate monsters and their lairs at higher levels. This, I take for granted.
If you don't like it, blame it on the Forgotten Realms lore rather than the game.
Conclusion: The steampunk elements aren't around enough for me to understand why you didn't enjoy the other 90% of the game. The term "art style" needs to be explained properly. I agree with everything I've read from @sandmanCCL regarding things I didn't cover.
If you don't like it, blame it on the Forgotten Realms lore rather than the game.
BG I gave us a beautiful Ferrai, BG II gave us a fugly domp truck. Even if the Steampunk only was implemented of 5% of the artwork, it still was in key areas where we had to pass by all the time, thus the relative amouth would rise significant.
It's a matter of taste, some just doesn't care, but some find it qualming.
If you don't like it, blame it on the Forgotten Realms lore rather than the game.
It's a matter of taste, some just doesn't care, but some find it qualming.
And that's why players like you would enjoy Medieval: Total War more than a Forgotten Realms RPG aspiring to give us places more exotic than the Nashkel Mines.
BG2 is a vastly prettier game to BG1. I legitimately cannot fathom why anyone would claim otherwise.
No disagreement here, BG2 had very high quality art compared to BG1. That said, that doesn't mean that BG2 art should be, by default, "more liked". By saying prettier art means you should like it more is an invalid argument because some people like simpler graphics.
So which one is better quality and which one is liked more, are two different discussions.
If you don't like it, blame it on the Forgotten Realms lore rather than the game.
It's a matter of taste, some just doesn't care, but some find it qualming.
And that's why players like you would enjoy Medieval: Total War more than a Forgotten Realms RPG aspiring to give us places more exotic than the Nashkel Mines.
Surely you are jesting?! Does M:TW have mages, dragons and other such weird Tolkienesque things? No? Please don't make such absurd comparisons!
BG2 is a vastly prettier game to BG1. I legitimately cannot fathom why anyone would claim otherwise.
No disagreement here, BG2 had very high quality art compared to BG1.
People seem to get confused by screen resolution, thinking it represents art quality.
No guys, BG2 and BG1 look exactly the same, except the character art and the fact that everything in your BG2 game is at 800x600 or higher(widescreen mod) resolution, while BG1 is stuck at 640x480. Of course it looks worse.
Compare the character art and the games at the same resolution with widescreen mod and infinity animations through a mod like BGT and come say to me again that BG2 looks prettier.
Does M:TW have mages, dragons and other such weird Tolkienesque things? No?
No, the TW-series have neither, that is true. Too bad there are no dragons or powerful mages in BG1 either, cause it seems that you'd enjoy that. Why not try it out in BG2?
Sorry for being a prick, but my patience was lost after having read the 5th post in this thread or so.
@HexHammer Medieval: Total War may not be a good suggestion, but the point is still valid. Different strokes for different folks. But it does seem strange picking up a Forgotten Realms title and than being disappointed because it has Forgotten Realms flavor. If you want vanilla Tolkien the Greyhawk setting is probably more to your style. I don't know of any CRPG games produced in that setting though. But there is no shortage of other series that fully explore this creative space.
Forgotten Realms is a different animal. That aspect wasn't explored too much in BG1 because the character just wasn't powerful enough. Forgotten Realms is an absurdly high magic setting. Again, I'm not saying you should like it. But I think the ship sailed on the art direction the moment they chose to adapt the game to the Realms. If the game had remained original IP it may have stayed in the same design space you prefer. I'm sure it would have been awesome that way as well. But they went further with the setting they chose and it seems like it makes sense thematically.
I believe that it was an incredibly competent change.
BG1's art was certainly more 'medieval-like' and more optimistic . However, I do believe that BG2's artwork makes you feel more 'out-of-place' , which is the intended atmosphere when a character has just been kidnaped and tortured. Machines and other mechanical stuff were placed conveniently.
I for one loved the bg2 art style and prefer it over bg1. The character portraits for the npcs actually look like adventures and look like they have been in a fight or two. As far as steam punkyness goes I don't remember anything like that unless in a dungeon ether owned by or having a wizard inside. But I chok that up to wizards and there crazy experiments which amn was dominated by cowald wizards if I remember correctly.
Me personally, I understood why the art style changed a little bit for BGII because of the different setting. Most of the art style changes were fine. Not a huge fan of the HUD though, and the inventory screen looks completely disgusting. I believe someone mentioned Plate Mail looking like a turtle shell, and that's a good example of what I mean by "disgusting." Stuff looked completely unnatural and weird, matte even when it should be shiny. Excessively cracked and such.
Buuuut other than the hideous inventory screen, the art style *did* fit the game. I heartily dislike mods such as TuTu that make BG1 look like BGII, then, clearly. Doing vice-versa would be just as bad. Either way I like this thread because it raises awareness THE GAMES HAVE DIFFERENT ART STYLES, STOP @#$%ING MIXING THE ART STYLES IT LOOKS GLARINGLY OBVIOUS AND HIDEOUS. Thank you.
(Also someone said something about two-handed animations looking totally horrible. Yeah, that's true as well not gonna lie.)
I for one loved the bg2 art style and prefer it over bg1. The character portraits for the npcs actually look like adventures and look like they have been in a fight or two.
And I should probably say, opinions like this don't bother me and are entirely legitimate; to each their own. But folks acting like, "hey a lot of people prefer the BGII art style. Lets throw in the odd BGII sprite into BG1 and expect it to look good, and not out of place or anything." should be shot. I'm looking at you, TuTu.
I loved BG2's art style. There is so much atmosphere from the moment you find yourself in the Promenade, and variety from Athkatla to Ust Natha to Suldanessellar, in particular I found the temple interiors quite awe inspiring. In comparison BG1 looks very generic. The equipment, the buildings, the trees, the wilderness in general are all very samey.
In reaction to the thread title: I don't enjoy the steam punk artstyle, but I really loved the artstyle of BG2. I played BG2 first though. It has the perfect graphics for my likings. The shields, the pictures of weapons in description screens, the unique armor artwork, the portraits, the interface, everything is just perfect. Playing BG1 after that was graphically very underwhelming, I didn't like most of the artwork and didn't like the sound effects of inventory interaction at first. I think it is purely a thing of preference. Both artists, the one who drew BG1 and the one who created the look of BG2 made a great job. But BG2, in my opinion, is just a tiny-little bit better.
Because I played BG1 first I always had a very hard time playing BG2, I don't hate BG2 but I certainly don't like it as much as most people seem to.
The biggest reason for it is the huge 180 in graphics, BG1 had a very dark, medieval feel to it while BG2 had very much of a steampunk, cheerful, happy, bright feel. This really didn't fit the story and while it fits the setting perfectly fine, the dark nature of the story just doesn't fit the setting.
I personally hated the change, still like BG2 but I really wish they kept the style as dark/medieval as opposed to bright/steampunk. I really wish they kept it in the Baldurs Gate region of the Sword Coast and expanded the regions you can explore as I think that would have been much more fitting and it would have allowed you to go visit places from BG1 and see how your actions in the previous game changed the world.
BG1 was very iron starved supposedly. BG2 demonstrates why. Never had a problem dealing with that. "X"punk is some version of a past's future technology happening early and it being made to use with what that time had. Magic being used and researched in gothic ways just does not fit that for me. The rest I blame on gnomes, because gnomes classically make everything in an overengineered style (as do some dwarves). I see more of a mix of industrial aesthetics of different races mashed up once a wide sampling can be built and seen by each other. Something you might find around an old mixed race coastal city in a heavy fantasy setting or something. I think I need a T-shirt of a dragon on a bicycle with the back trying to explain to people how that it is not "science fiction". I guess it would be steampunk to most though, if it had a monocle.
Again, you compare BG1 (dark, medieval) with BG2 (bright, steampunk). How the hell are BG2's steampunk elements so prominent that it defines the whole setting of the game for you?
I also don't think that BG2 is "brighter", or happier by any means, please explain what you mean with your choice of words here. Are the light settings different? Not that I remember. Perhaps you're referring to BG1's somewhat grittier tones here and there, comparing Nashkel's dirt roads with Trademeet's clean streets for example. That's as close as I can guess, and even then it doesn't make much sense.
Art style, bright- and cheerfulness.. The terms are so general it's impossible to try and understand exactly what you're thinking of in many of these posts.
Yeah I don't see it as steam punk at all. I where are the guns and air ships come on. And as far as brighter no from my experience of both games bg2 is much darker in content and just has more colors in total to make the picture better.
Comments
He is referring to the Spell Jammer and Planar stuff (both of which includes steampunk elements) stuff that you get exposed to in BG2, which I agree was a little bit of a surprise. Before I was aware of what Spell Jammer (or the Planes) was I thought it was pretty odd too after playing through BG1 which had little of that.
I guess there are maybe too often in BG2, since the higher the levels, the more high fantasy - weird contraption - planar stuff you will encounter.
It's not that FR are steampunked, it's that BG2 has more of that element, but it's not that evident.
It certainly did not make me dislike BG2, i love it, i just consider the character art of BG2 not to my liking, worse than the first game.
I do admit however, that i prefer BG1's more "down to earth" atmosphere. A normal-sort of- medieval world. Too much high fantasy and "steampunk" elements usually killed games for me.
The only exception is Planescape:Torment. I hated the graphic direction obviously, but the story was that badass, it made you bypass anything else. Still, in order to play it, i started and dropped it about 5 times.
And the planar stuff is necessary in my opinion at the power levels present in the second game. Once your a high teens dual classed paragon with emerging god powers it gets kind of hard to challenge you with run of the mill medieval style encounters. There just can't be that many dragons in the woods around a city. What would they eat?
I mean come on, hitting someone in BG 2 with a 2-handed sword either looks like you're almost falling over forward or "just touching your enemy with the tip of your sword". A character with a 2-hander looks so clumsy!
Next item: shields and helmets. No need to discuss about taste in graphics here, I think many many people just prefer the old style way more to the one in BG2 - at this point I have to mention that I don't know how to thank Erephine enough for her great work.
To me the style of BG 1 looked way more mediaeval, brutal and apropriate. The horned helmets / tin helmets (always killed that Flaming Fist guy on the road because of his fricking awesome helmet! "I AM THE LAW" - bam, dead), the armor of a warrior, the casting sounds, the weapon sound effects, the stoned-themed UI - everything was darker, more brutal and did not look like cloth & armor from a faraway country. Call me antiquated - but in "my imagination" shields have to look like the shields in all those well known tales of knights and dragons - and the same goes for helmets, other armor etc.
Oh and by the way - did I mention that it looks absolutely ridiculous how tall and bulky human females in BG 2 are? You just need to compare the Imoen in BG 1 to the Imoen in BG 2: In BG1 she had a fragile but yet gracile body, just as a female thief (with strength 9 if you want) has to look like. But what about her in BG2? Due to the BG2 female (thief or mage) avatar Imoen looks so incredibly bulky, she almost can spit my human male mage on the head!
Because of this flaw I always modded her race and appearance to half-elf / elf, in order to spare my eyes that view
Amn is meant to be an incredibly wealthy trading city, not a backwater town such as BG.
There are many misconceptions about art styles and decoration. For example, in medieval times, most wealthy castles were painted and very colorful inside, not dull grey stone.
Steam punk is just junk, it's clear a lot of thought went into the BG2 art style.
Well, for me the change in direction as far as the artwork is concerned happened mainly to fit the new setting and to complement the feeling of the story and the atmosphere it generates and I have to say it's doing it pretty damn well. I mean at first those wacky shields with their crazy Chtulhu-esque geometry didn't stick too well. Same goes for the scimitars and wakizashis and katanas but as I got to see more of Amn and understand its cultural background (btw the lore found in the random books REALLY helps with this) it felt right and I did like it. My point is that complaining about the look of the plate mail or too much machinery is equal to complaining about the appearance of exotic weapons and that means that what you're really complaining about is the diversity and depth of the world setting - which in this case here is Forgotten Realms.
Seriously though, BG2 is gorgeous. I loved its 'exotic' defiled nature, if you want standard medieval then play BG1 or ... Dragon Age, LOL. That style of medieval RPG is crazy unimaginative, no wonder the developers chose Athkatla as BG2's game city, the city of coin and opportunity!
Also, the Machine of Lum The Mad has been around since 1e. It's a well-known encounter in D&D worlds.
I feel like Xzar right now. "Montaron, you can be so aggrivating!" Except Montaron can be replaced with people having pre-concieved notions about "steampunk" and how it is "universally bad." Or some such nonsense.
Pretty sure FF6 is one of the most beloved entries into that series, and it was also the one that introduced a "steampunk" element into the saga. Awesome game. Hard to dislike the art in that, with the hand-drawn sprites n such. Fast forward to Dishonored just a few weeks ago. It's actually also not "Steampunk" but has elements of it. It's hauntingly beautiful and full of tons of soul.
It's sort of like when people throw around the term "cyberpunk." Shadowrun was tehnically cyberpunk and was awesome. In a strange way, Warhammer 40k is a cyberpunk spin on your stereotypical fantasy set up. Both are still extremely cool.
I think I'm just going to have to chalk this up to me not understanding the beef and dropping out of this conversation before my head explodes.
Faerun is, as we know, not a medieval world by any means. Why expect solely medieval influences when playing a fantasy game? The "steampunk" stuff, which isn't seen much apart from certain dungeons, doesn't have anything to do with the everyday life of the regular people of Amn or Athkatla, whose culture has a lot of influences from 16th-century Spain and the Moors (Muslims that once inhabited part of Spain during the middle-ages). I am absolutely in love with how they've portrayed this in the game. Thus, even with no steampunk elements, the general "art style" has to differ alot from BG1.
If BG1 would have quests and dungeons for higher-level characters, they would propably look more like the Planar Sphere or Chateau Irenicus than Durlag's Keep. Alot of things in Faerun differ from your standard medieval fantasy world if you want to be challenged by appropriate monsters and their lairs at higher levels. This, I take for granted.
If you don't like it, blame it on the Forgotten Realms lore rather than the game.
Conclusion: The steampunk elements aren't around enough for me to understand why you didn't enjoy the other 90% of the game. The term "art style" needs to be explained properly. I agree with everything I've read from @sandmanCCL regarding things I didn't cover.
It's a matter of taste, some just doesn't care, but some find it qualming.
And that's why players like you would enjoy Medieval: Total War more than a Forgotten Realms RPG aspiring to give us places more exotic than the Nashkel Mines.
So which one is better quality and which one is liked more, are two different discussions.
Please don't make such absurd comparisons!
No guys, BG2 and BG1 look exactly the same, except the character art and the fact that everything in your BG2 game is at 800x600 or higher(widescreen mod) resolution, while BG1 is stuck at 640x480. Of course it looks worse.
Compare the character art and the games at the same resolution with widescreen mod and infinity animations through a mod like BGT and come say to me again that BG2 looks prettier.
Sorry for being a prick, but my patience was lost after having read the 5th post in this thread or so.
Forgotten Realms is a different animal. That aspect wasn't explored too much in BG1 because the character just wasn't powerful enough. Forgotten Realms is an absurdly high magic setting. Again, I'm not saying you should like it. But I think the ship sailed on the art direction the moment they chose to adapt the game to the Realms. If the game had remained original IP it may have stayed in the same design space you prefer. I'm sure it would have been awesome that way as well. But they went further with the setting they chose and it seems like it makes sense thematically.
BG1's art was certainly more 'medieval-like' and more optimistic . However, I do believe that BG2's artwork makes you feel more 'out-of-place' , which is the intended atmosphere when a character has just been kidnaped and tortured. Machines and other mechanical stuff were placed conveniently.
As far as steam punkyness goes I don't remember anything like that unless in a dungeon ether owned by or having a wizard inside. But I chok that up to wizards and there crazy experiments which amn was dominated by cowald wizards if I remember correctly.
Buuuut other than the hideous inventory screen, the art style *did* fit the game. I heartily dislike mods such as TuTu that make BG1 look like BGII, then, clearly. Doing vice-versa would be just as bad. Either way I like this thread because it raises awareness THE GAMES HAVE DIFFERENT ART STYLES, STOP @#$%ING MIXING THE ART STYLES IT LOOKS GLARINGLY OBVIOUS AND HIDEOUS. Thank you.
(Also someone said something about two-handed animations looking totally horrible. Yeah, that's true as well not gonna lie.) And I should probably say, opinions like this don't bother me and are entirely legitimate; to each their own. But folks acting like, "hey a lot of people prefer the BGII art style. Lets throw in the odd BGII sprite into BG1 and expect it to look good, and not out of place or anything." should be shot. I'm looking at you, TuTu.
I think it is purely a thing of preference. Both artists, the one who drew BG1 and the one who created the look of BG2 made a great job. But BG2, in my opinion, is just a tiny-little bit better.
The biggest reason for it is the huge 180 in graphics, BG1 had a very dark, medieval feel to it while BG2 had very much of a steampunk, cheerful, happy, bright feel. This really didn't fit the story and while it fits the setting perfectly fine, the dark nature of the story just doesn't fit the setting.
I personally hated the change, still like BG2 but I really wish they kept the style as dark/medieval as opposed to bright/steampunk. I really wish they kept it in the Baldurs Gate region of the Sword Coast and expanded the regions you can explore as I think that would have been much more fitting and it would have allowed you to go visit places from BG1 and see how your actions in the previous game changed the world.
Again, you compare BG1 (dark, medieval) with BG2 (bright, steampunk). How the hell are BG2's steampunk elements so prominent that it defines the whole setting of the game for you?
I also don't think that BG2 is "brighter", or happier by any means, please explain what you mean with your choice of words here. Are the light settings different? Not that I remember. Perhaps you're referring to BG1's somewhat grittier tones here and there, comparing Nashkel's dirt roads with Trademeet's clean streets for example. That's as close as I can guess, and even then it doesn't make much sense.
Art style, bright- and cheerfulness.. The terms are so general it's impossible to try and understand exactly what you're thinking of in many of these posts.