My thoughts on engine technology and what might happen with A7.. remember this is total speculation on my part so dont take it too seriously. First off I think A6 has a good while to go yet and many improvements will be made. When it comes time for A7, they may decide to totally redo the terrain/outdoor part of the engine, adding in a much more integrated terrain editor, prolly in WED instead of in MED. Also, speaking of WED, it think that's going to change a lot.. i would imagine support for higher-order surfaces, and support for real-time viewports.. meaning the viewport will look pretty much like it will in the game, real-time lighting depending on whether they fully embrace some kind of new lighting model. There could be just an open ended material system as there is now, or there may be more integral support for a particluar lighting system, perhaps some kind of spherical lighting model and High Dynamic Range. Again you can't always use the same lighting system for everything usually.. FarCry is an excellent example of a multi-lighting-model system, using diffuse lighting on terrains, and bump+specular on indoors.. they also use lightmapping in FarCry and HL2, so i doubt A7 will totally abandon lightmapping the way Doom3 did. I would expect also more types of dynamic shadows, including projected shadow maps and soft shadowing. Anyway this is my speculation so who knows what really will happen.