RPGs & Arachnophobia

This is cribbed from Tycho's link on Penny Arcade, but 1up had a great article on Ubisoft's upcoming Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. This is a first-person RPG (a la Morrowind), but the unique thing about it is that it's powered by Valve's excellent Source engine, from Half-Life 2 -- this brings along ragdoll physics, not to mention super-interactive environments:

By using Valve's Source engine to power their game, developer Arkane has the means to offer plenty of interactive objects in the game world. Use a fireball to shoot down a rock pillar and it may collapse onto your enemies. Another nifty feature was the freeze spell. Once enemies are frozen, you can either hack them to pieces, or opt for the more fun option. We were shown a sequence where and enemy was frozen while standing on a rope bridge. The player the proceeded to chop down the bridge supports and watch the frozen enemy fall and then break into a million pieces upon impact with a rocky bottom.

Anyway, it's kind of funny that regardless of how much technology is shoehorned into a game, every fantasy-based RPG *must* include hordes of giant spiders (see image above). This is rather disappointing, because gargantuan tarantulas give me the creeps like nothing else -- not too long ago, I was playing Neverwinter Nights (which has a God's-eye isometric perspective), but when hordes of giant spiders scuttled into the basement of an infested house in Luskan . . . *shudder* just. no.

yuck.