[Arryn]

No offense intended to the IW folks, but the thing you must understand, Esben, is that IW does not have (AFAIK) any professional software engineers. Dom 2 has been created in the "spare" time of a few folks whose day jobs are something other than being programmers, game architects, graphics designers, network engineers, et cetera. It's actually remarkable that they've been able to do as well as they have given their relative lack of in-depth knowledge of professional computer game design (as compared to almost all other game dev shops) or even the inner workings of the coding tools they're using. I think you may be expecting too much from them, however nice your suggestions sound (at least they sound great to me). Perhaps if they become successful enough to consider giving up their day jobs, or hiring outside 'experts', then we might see the sort of polished product we'd love to have.

IW reminds me a lot of Paradox, who also began with 2 coders. After several years of popular products, they've grown to the point of recently soliciting for additional programmers. (Hopefully they've hired someone who actually has a clue on how to code a competent AI, and even more importantly, gotten a decent internal QA manager.) IW appears, to me, to be sort of following in the footsteps of Paradox. More or less. The largest difference is that I'm sure Strategy First has more money to throw at Paradox than Shrapnel has to throw at IW, since SF is a by far bigger publisher (nor better, just bigger). With more money, you can try to do more (or more difficult) things.