Hand drawn or pixel art doesn’t matter, it’s just a style decision. You can have quality in both directions, HD has as much to do with artistic skill as pixel art. Both takes long to create.

If the press wouldn’t constantly fail to educate people about the actual costs of gamedev, stuff like this would never happen.

what do you mean with “hobby grade?”

Shooters also can have very interesting worlds. The prime example for that most probably is Metroid Prime haha =D

We implement an option to switch it off in the game. For the trailer it looks more impressive.

That’s why we described it as “16-bit inspired”. The SNES or NeoGeo wouldn’t be able to handle Tower57.

Sorry to disappoint you. But as small indie developers without money / current team size we simply can’t afford to pull off an RPG. It will get hard enough to realize tower 57.