I actually like the more realistic touch. Never was a fan of cel-shading style, like the Wind Waker, or overly cartoonish, for RPGs (Tales of Symphonia was a stretch). Final Fantasy is a relatively good example (up to FFX).
Hmm, but at least you can still play
Wind Waker, without carving your eye out with a spoon.
Colouring: interesting, I never saw the difference so clearly before.
As for the change of tone: why not wait and see or watch some previewvideos? As far as I can see, the humor is still there (for example if you talk with a dog, he tells you that he hates his mistress for dressing him up like a doll. Or you ask a ghost who killed her and she answers dryly with "you") and since the story seems to be more darker in tone, the look seems to fit. But I can understand if this bothers you. I replay the game at the moment with a friend and we love how alive the world feels just with the beautiful lightning.
But I had something else on my mind: I asked myself if the game will become more linear, since we play escaped prisoners on the run? The first game was a treasure hunt so it solved (for me at least) the pacing problem those kind of games have. But with Source Hunters behind us, the only way for us should be forward, so we shouldn't go back to older areas.
This reminds me a bit of
Beyond Divinity, which had chapters instead of the more open approach,
Divinity 1. Granted,
in Divinity 2, you couldn't back to some areas too, so it wouldn't really be something new, but I still ask myself, how Larian plans to give us
THE FEELING of being hunted and on the run.
