Q: On to more technical stuff ... Why is Snowblind's BG:DA engine so damn good?

A: Because it's very good at what it does. It's funny, when we started off we were like "Wow, this engine looks great!" and had all these design ideas. And I'm totally not ripping on the engine, but when we were like "Hey, let's change the camera mode to this!" ... Nooooo. The engine's really good at top-down isometric, at rendering everything from a certain distance and at a certain angle. Keeping everything in that frame looking nice and crisp and keeping things fairly smooth. That's what they focused on, whereas I think some other engines might focus on what's going on in the whole room, or if the player stops they could go to first-person and look around at the ceiling and stuff. This engine doesn't do that, and that's part of its strength in what you see on the screen, the fact that you're not looking at a whole lot outside of what's being presented in this isometric view from this distance.