If it's playable in top-down view that sounds ok. But as you say, in this day we expect more from games. Sounds to me like they built on the NWN1 engine and added some more 3D into that, rather than developing from scratch (maybe they felt that fans of NWN1 wouldn't stand for a radical rethink on the game engine).
Much of the problem now is that if you've played any of the MMORPGs that have come out in the past few years, be it DAOC, WoW, SWG, CoH etc, they have set certain standards for roleplaying games in terms of graphics, camera angles, immersion factor etc which it's hard now to get away from.
This is no accident. MMORPGs look like they do because people like that way of viewing a game world. Which means that games with more 'old fashioned' camera angles such as top-down and isometric etc really have to be doing that format slickly to make it worthwhile sticking with. Most of the problems seem to come when there's an attempt to please both the 'top downers' and the 'FPers' within the same game as the game engine isn't optimised for either.