Hmmm that would mean incredibly bad performance though. I mean, there is even a machine performance test, before you can play online, because the game is too heavy for many machines these days, while running 8p games just fine back in the day on waaaaay weaker hardware than most people have these days. What then is causing the massive performance regressions? Maybe resolution increase?

To me it looks kinda 3D, when you pane left right and look at buildings, but I could be wrong and that could be merely some effect, that also takes some on the fly calculation.