Okey, I may have exagerated a bit indeed, colors need to be quite flat, but then again, why are there doom3 mods out there able to minimize the plastic look? I've seen their skin textures (infact I've worked on some of them some time ago (search for the 'Doom can do it too' threads) and specular maps too, it doesn't quite look the same.

Again, i'm not dissing the Doom3 engine here. The per-pixel bumpmaps, diffuse, specular, and light-filter cubemaps and stencil shadows volumes for all lights are pretty impressive.

Cheers