I always got the feeling that the script was pretty good, but the delivery of many of the lines and the overall direction and execution fell a bit flat.

If it wasn't taboo, though, why would it be in the news in any way at all?

I can still take movies without incessant racket, right?

Rasterizing triangles and the "first intersection" on a ray tracer actually give exactly the same result for a triangle mesh.

Ray tracing has a more obvious mapping onto the rendering equation, but rendering geometry or even first order reflections offers very little advantage (and several disadvantages) over rasterization techniques. Shadows are more implicit in ray tracing, but they don't look "better" until you have area light sources and start shooting a LOT of rays.

And that's really the problem. Most of the cool things you might want to do with ray tracing (soft shadows, photon mapping or other global illumination) involve shooting multiple-orders-of-magnitude more rays than simply drawing a game level.

If I had a fast hardware ray tracer, I'm sure I could find some very cool stuff to do with it, but wasting a ton of cycles doing what rasterization is perfectly adequate at is a bit pointless. It seems like a solution in search of a problem. If we could rasterize a scene normally, but do multiple raycasts in the pixel shader to determine light occlusion (shadows), we might be on the right track.

People keep complaining about this, and having finished the game, I think they should just shut up and play the game. Let's put this simply: "Can't die" == "Auto-restore to the last safe point" You can fail, exactly the same as you would have with a death mechanic. Over and over and over until you get it right. You just don't have to quicksave/quickload every time you screw it up, and get a nice animation instead. It's a minor semantic/presentation difference, and everyone bitches like it's the end of the world.