Developer's Corner sends word they are now hosting a messageboard devoted to the doings of Shiny and TeamEgo as they work on Messiah. The boards will be visited by the humble folks at Team Ego to answer questions when applicable, so if you are anticipating this upcoming third-person action title, or perhaps are just interested in discussions of the cutting-edge 3D technology being used in the game, check them out. In fact in passing through, I see that Shiny's Scott Herrington posted an answer to a question about environmental bump-mapping, saying that though they initially planned to support it out of the box on Messiah, it turns out this will not be the case. Here's the deal:

Messiah will not support environmental bumpmapping. We did some tests, and while it looked promising, the time to implement it in the game far outweighed the benefits. After all, bumpmapping is usually used to 'fake' additional polygonal detail - and with the characters in such high detail to begin with, we really didn't see a huge benefit.
That said, it'll be a feature in the next project that Team Ego makes (which will probably be one of 3 things: add-on pack, sequel, or entirely new game) since more hardware will support it at that time.