[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by CB..

that's what i suspect i have to say--they have been draining us dry with never ending graphics card up-grades--now the graphics side has sort of reached a plateaux--they are fishing around for other ways to fleece us dry---sooner or later as you say we will be paying huge amounts of money to have AI that won't actually be any better than the destroyers in AOTD or the soldiers in Half Life 1--

i like the idea- but just don't think they're doing it to gives us better gameplay---better gameplay is cheap and easy and can be run on a PII 300mghz with 16 mb of graphics ram-- it's like the guy who steals your garden furniture then runs round the front of the house knocks on your door and sells it back to you at a vastly inflated price --then moans at all the problems he had carting the bench fron the back of your house to the front--and demands a tip--

Yeah, I think we have reached a platue too in the graphics department. I mean, cooler stuff will come down the line like HDR recently, but for the most part, no one company is going to spend 2 years just creating chracter models to make use of too much more GPU power. Yeah - great - the card can push a ton of pixels, but who wants to spend the time to program it? They will just compensate by putting more objects instead of better looking objects. Of course there will be a few games that make use of it, but the time they spend making good looking models will be lost in the gameplay department. It will be a lackluster game meant for eye candy only. Anyway, maybe I am being too negative, but I feel a lot of games are just cookie cutter games these days and people are trying to just make it look better than past games without making better or different revolutionary gameplay.

-S

PS. THe AI in FEAR was pretty good. Many times I found myself doubling back to shoot the enemy in the back and I ran into the enemy face to face trying to do the same thing to me!