Ecliptic, JohnMcguirk: either one of you two ever do any serious 3d work? To design a decent high-poly organic mesh takes some time, but decent textures take longer, and proper animation is the kingpin of time (at least for me with my home studio and no $$$ motion-capture). What you're asking for, to only take 1 year's work, would require a dedicated team of at least a dozen veteran designers working a full 40hrs/week. That's just for gfx: you'll also need scripters and sound. And all this is assuming that you're going to use a system/engine already out; otherwise you'll need a full coding team to create a whole new client. A years work? That would be historic proportions for the game design community.
What you could do is make a mod of a few zones - I recommend using TES's construction set. You can get some great poly-counts with it, and it has a wonderful built-in world editor & quest/item creator. And being a mod, I don't know how applicable copyrighted material is being a free distrubution system.
In the end, would it be worth it? That depends: if you spend the hundreds of hours just to create a product just for the sake of creation, then you might walkaway satisfied. But usually people create something with the hope to watch the masses fall in love with it: that'll never happen with an updated EQ1.
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