I read in some recent article that the "pursue other interests" part was only part of NCSoft letter, not Garriott's actual intentions. Yay Ultima 11(12?)
Latching onto that ^ .. Work/Life Balance. Not all of us are excited about spending 12 hours a day in front of a computer screen, all for "the love of games!!1"..
I easily rendered a 12 millions tris model with xnormal, and that was before all the memory optimizations and gpu AO, so I guess that's pretty safe now