Yeah well, I suppose it's also quite expensive to keep buying excellent development houses and then gutting them like fish. And it doesn't exactly give you a lot of return on your investment.

I think you really nailed something here with regards to graphics. The push with graphics always seems to be for sharper, flashier, more photo-realistic graphics, but this doesn't necessarily make for good graphics, especially several years down the road. On the other hand, stylized graphics that are focused on supporting the overall atmosphere of the game can still look good many years later, even if they weren't on the technical cutting edge even when the game was released. For example, Disciples 2 is an absolutely beautiful game by any standards, despite being nearly 5 years old. Beyond Good and Evil and Psychonauts are two more games with fairly stylized graphics that weren't cutting edge even when released, but which still stand up incredibly well today (and manage to make the characters in them incredibly alive and expressive despite/because of the non-photorealistic, stylized graphics). Game designers need to remember that graphics technology is simply a tool that can be used to help fulfill the vision they have for a game, it's not something they should try to shoehorn into their game simply because they think people will be attracted to the latest shiny.

Hehe, I've been saying that ever since the "it MUST be 3D" movement started in game development circles.

Was an interesting read. Did like the little gog mentions hopefully get some new blood from that. Think to say only1 big RPG this year is wrong has people forgoton Risen ok not as big at DA:O but still a hell of a good rpg and Divinity2 due soon that looks like it has huge potential to being a great rpg.

For RPGs as well as other type of games, I just don't expect anything good from the marketing guys running the big companies (that's the wisdom of old age !). Gone are the days where the "big" companies (like SSI, or Bioware 10 years ago) were run by passionate gamers.
Now accountants and marketing own them all, and only indie devs are able to invent anything that interest me (to name a few : Cryptic comet, Spiderweb..). Still I would have tried DA:O if it didn't require a competition rig I haven't....