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IMO it's a waste of effort to exactly replicate TFC, especially with valve looming. Isn't that the lesson we learned w/ FF? We tried to walk that line so much in FF and it took so much time and resources just to try and get parity with TFC (which while getting close we did not even achieve) and everything else suffered/people were long burned out by release, etc..
If you are serious about this my advice would be to NOT re-create TFC, instead try to identify and agree on what core elements made TFC fun for different people...master those core elements, and build onto that from a fresh starting point. It can be done better. Don't focus on every little quirk that was in TFC, drill down into the underlying aspects of what made it fun. It is less about the specific 'what' and more about the 'why. i.e. concs were fun because they offered a viable alternative to brute force to get around somebody. You could use them to propel yourself past an opponent, or to dizzy them, or to propel your opponent out of position in a myriad of ways. There was a tremendous depth in skill in just using that one mechanic. What that mechanic allowed is what is important, not the specific implementation. But things like separate health and armor? Yeah it provided little tiny quirks, but ultimately was totally secondary to what made the game fun. It only existed in the first place because it was grandfathered in.
There's so many little aspects that are nostalgic and have charm and created very specific little strategies over the years, but they were not core to what made the game fun. In many cases they added needless complexity. A lot of them were annoyances we grew to learn and adapted to and eventually loved. The problem is that the next generation of players will not stay through that experience.
When I have played other games like monday night combat, or titanfall they have hit on some core elements that made tfc fun for me (despite totally different approaches), but miss on others. The best way to re-capture the 'magic' of tfc is to build out something new w/ the same underlying concepts.
Anyway that unsolicited advice aside I hope you would shoot for the simplest, cleanest art style you can produce w/ the fewest amount of resources. Hell dev texture maps in source are very popular and they use something like 3 different textures.
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