Yes. Gameplay comes first, for sure. Doom3 was boring because of the repetitive gameplay. "Beyond Good and Evil" was way better because of a superb gameplay. But even this comic game did use shaders, motion blur, depth of field and much more.

There is no problem to offer a non shader game. But this is not the future. All actual game productions try to create more details. And you cannot reach a certain level of details without shaders. Modern games use models that look like a million polygons because they are created from a million polygons and details are baked into a normalmap (and because of that you cannot easily add quality normalmaps to characters later on, you have to model that right from the beginning). You will only betray yourself when you believe you can compete without this. Look at this and you will see what I mean:
http://www.projectoffset.com/



But there is a market for casual games, kids games, educational games, puzzle games and much more that do not need any shader at all. But in a first person shooter you will not get away without it. And this raises one big question: Isn't 3d Gamestudio an engine that claims to be made suitable for first person shooters? At the moment I think it is better suited to cartoon looking games. But even in this field more and more companies use modern technology.

And concerning the point that shaders are slow: I think this is nonesense in some cases. Modern graphic cards will render faster with a wise use of shaders. BSP levels in A6 are often much slower because they do not use any advantage of the graphic cards. They need heavy CPU work. With that in mind a well made shader game with models and octree could be faster than a BSP game without shaders. But that is only true for modern hardware.

With that in mind I appreciate the work of Matt_AufderHeide and I am really grateful that he shares his results with us. Thank you.