If you take an old car, let's say a Datsun 240z, and you replace the engine, the seats, the suspension and the tires with newer versions. At what point is it a new car? Would you tell people you built that car from scratch? If they couldn't see the parts that were still in it, but that were vitally important to it running, like the frame, would they believe you?

First of all, if you've ever played any computer game ever, you know that 99% of marketing says about it before it comes out is extremely over exaggerated hype. No I don't believe verbatim everything Gamespy and IGN say. And no I don't believe everything Valve or Id says, verbatim.

The fact is I've played the leak, and I know a lot about how computer games work, especially Quake, and there are still a LOT of vestiges of the Quake engine plainly visible WITHOUT seeing any source code. That doesn't bother me at all. What bothers me is Valve lying saying it's "from scratch" and that it's "the Source Engine" without giving any credit to the fact that without the Quake engine it'd just be a bunch of code snippets of plugin features to any generic modern game.

As for the r_speeds thing, there is a self-imposed limit as evidenced by the fact that on the r_speeds screen it shows "x/y" where y is a static number which I can't remember off hand, but it was extremely low, something like 2000. Also, while walking around with r_speeds on any time x went over y, the frame rate dropped dramatically. Now I understand a few things, being that this could be raw wpoly and not include shader passes, which could increase the actual count by as much as 4. I also realize that because it was a leak, it could easily be improved upon or changed completely before release, especially after it was delayed for 6 months. None of these things really bother more, nor do I care about them. What really bothers me is the way Valve conducts themselves. The way they strategically keep quiet on certain subjects, and they never give a straight answer to any question that might expose a limit of their game. They are marketers first, and game designers second. 95% of game companies are like that, but what bothers me is that the HL/CS fanboys REFUSE to accept that marketing for any game is mostly lies and exaggeration. Valve tells them HL2 is the second coming of Jesus and they believe in it absolutely.