why it will never happen again in the 99 per cent of fighting games:

-too costly to digitize all of the actors surface

-past its prime, digi. actors are outdated and look plain old.

-more trouble to work with

-a 3d model+bump mapper technology is faster, easier to handle, faster.

-looses frames, it would look incredibly choppy since you cannot digi. all of
their 30 frames during a kick. an artificial body can live up to 3000 frames.

-noone does it. it is obsolete to no end. it can only work in FMV movies and
recorded sequences, but thats a heavy toll on disk space and moduling.

I don't think that going back to digitizing actors is the answer, but I definitely agree that the shiny characters in the recent MK games are very weak in comparison to what's acheivable nowadays. I mean, Shujinko looks old, yet he has no wrinkles. No one has scars on their face or any exposed limbs. There are no flaws. No moles, no beard scruff, no facial expressions, no eye bags, no forehead rumples or furrowed brows, no arm hair etc etc etc. In short, there's nothing that makes each character look like a real person. You look at pics from games like Gears of War or the new next gen Medal of Honor and you have alot of that stuff.

I'm sincerely hoping that this will be the direction that the MK team decides to go in when they eventually bring out a next gen Mortal Kombat. But c'mon, Shun Di of Virtua Fighter 4 looks old because of his wrinkiles and his baggy eyes etc and that's obviously current gen. Why MK decides to leave all of that detail out is beyond me, but I really think that making these characters look as realistic as possible with polygons would go a long way to making them look almost as good in the current gaming era as digitized graphics made the MK cast look back in the day.

That's my ten cents anyways...