What's amazing to me is this is the same engine for both their 2D and 3D offerings. Now it wouldn't be a huge stretch to re-populate the 2D rendering models used to create really nice 3D creatures/players. Actually, they did that with UO-TD and people howeled. Problem is they just didn't follow through with making sure the client was bug-free and intuitive.
I'd love to see the Iris people get a grant from EA to finish this one. Basically the same client, but able to render both 2D and 3D. Imagine that from EA?