And there will be new teams that will use existing rendering engines and technologies, combine them with great stories and innovative gameplay to create their own worlds. . In conclusion the whole shooter community is kind of at a crossroad. Personally I think they will. I beleive John Carmack stated at the conclusion of Q3 that he wanted to take time to look in to new technologies and see how these types of engines and game technologies could be used in other much more diversified applications. We'll know if id can pull that off when their next game comes out, because I'm fairly certain we all know it is NOT going to be another Quake.
Graphics can make or break a game.
I'm not saying Doom sucks, I still enjoy giving a few Imps a taste of my buckshot. Now, for example if you take the Unreal Tournament, and just give it the Q3 engine, it wouldn't be Unreal Tournament, it would be a mod for Q3. Let's suppose for a second that id decided to include their own version of Rocket Arena shipped with the game. The UT community, on the other hand, is a MUCH younger community and I think doesn't have the same kind of proliferation in mods that we have. Frankly, if I went solely upon what I read from people within the community regarding the gameplay vs. graphics issue, I would think that graphics are WAY less important to a game than gameplay.