Recently, I have been playing the beta of Team Fortress 2, a game that I have been anticipating for years. I kept thinking, this is what PVKII should have been like! Whimsical, exaggerated, funny. And certainly not realistic. Stylistically, the original Pirates, Vikings, and Knights was inspired in part by the cartoonish visuals of adventure games such as the Monkey Island series. But the technology to make such non-realistic graphics was not there at the time, and so I think PVK was more like a combination between this and the more ‘realistic’ elements of the shooter that it was based on. The specific effects used in TF2, phong shading and 1d diffuse mapping, were also not available in the Source engine when we started PVKII so long ago, and so we didn’t have much of a choice in visuals. But there was a choice involved in other aspects of realism. It was apparent from the beginning that PVKII was going to maintain a certain semblance of historical accuracy, despite the underlying tone of silliness non-historical accuracy in having pirates, vikings, and knights all fighting each other at the same time. This is not necessarily a bad idea, and it at least has some element of cohesiveness that goes well with artistic direction that the game has gone in. But if Pirates, Vikings, and Knights II did have non-photorealistic style of rendering seen in Team Fortress 2, we would certainly expect to see stereotypical vikings with horned helmets. (Or, as some have suggested, the horns actually grow on their head, and they merely but helmets over top of them.)
It is of course, too late to go back and start all over again. It is simply not possible for a mod to be comparable to a fully funded professionally produced game. We have a very fun mod in its own right that the PVK team is continuing to improve and develop. We will continue doing so in the future.