Is there anything you really want to implement but are waiting for the technology to catch up?asked by Brian Feldman

The biggest one would be proper ray-tracing [a rendering technique for tracing paths of light] and I would love to be free of polygons [the shapes that compose 3-D models]. That is a longer-term tech plan but that is probably four or five years down the road. In general in games. There is talk of techniques to use now where the processing is powerful enough that you can move away from the way you've built games over the past twenty years.

You need some heavy-duty computational power to do some of that stuff though, which is why people haven't done it today, but longer term it'll move that way. It'll just be a far more photorealistic rendering. Lighting actually makes a massive difference to how a scene feels, it's definitely one of the key area of how you emotionally connect to a scene.