Actually, it's even tougher. Game engines, especially in online multiplayer games, have to do realtime motion physics reactions whilst juggling unpredictable player actions, all of which has to be done and current by the next outbound TCP/IP packet. Animations proggies have the luxury of time by comparison, which is why typical animation proggies can deal with 20,000-200,000 poly humaniod models, while the practical limit for the upcoming Unreal2 engine is 3,500 polys per player character model, and that's being pushy about it. Currently, 1100 polys per player model is just about the breaking point for Quake3 or Unreal Tournament if you want to play online with a decent frame rate (and an 1100 poly model in UT will reeeeally bog down a server :( ). (heh... guess who used to get into coding mods real big? :p ) Now - IB's right, in that as many bugs as humanly possible should be stomped out of existence before shipment. OTOH, from a practical IT point of view, expecting a coder to catch 'em all is impossible - the best you can hope for is that the bugs are tiny, inconsequential things that won't get in your way before the inevitable patch comes out. As much as I would love to see a perfect software release, I believe that only the program "Hello World" came out 100% bug-free, and even then I'm not so sure. Incidentally, a LOT of game engines usually patch frequently, becuase cheaters find (sig it with me now) bugs. While these bugs are normally inconsequential and un-noticed by the majority, they can be exploited to make a shitty player into a gaming gawd, all with the minimum of effort (Counterstrike's Wall-hack, Quake3's "button6" debacle, Diablo/Everquest's dupe bugs, UT's continued need for CHSP, WinAce, Ratbots, purefuck.exe, etc etc etc...) BTW, IB, I've seen games that take 3-4 years too... and well - can you say "Daikatana" or "Anachronox"? I have yet to play with P5, so I don't honestly know what the deal is yet. I'm not coddling CL here, but I think that there has been more than the usual griping going on in this case... /P