Raven improved with Quake IV and it turned out better than I expected. The trend may well continue. I guess we'll see when this comes out.

I see complaints about lack of innovation but in previous posts about all the new things that they are adding or changing, people complained about each of those as well.

I'm willing to give them a chance on this one.

One thing that I hope they won't do is try to pack in so many extra visual effects that they are afraid to put more than one or two baddies on the screen at the same time for fear that the rendering engine will slow down to only a few fps. Gameplay is far more important than cramming in every last doodad. This has happened to too many games in the industry.