We do have some very cool things going on with regards to UI. It was an immensely in depth and detailed discussion over a lengthy period of time.
However when you talk about looking for variety, I think anyone taking that path needs to be very careful.
Look, for the most part everyone on this board is a hard core passionate gamer. We have "great ideas" and "cool things" we think will make any game 10x better than it is. What a lot of people don"t get or have at times is perspective.
I am the first person, and Danuser will tell you this, that starts the conversation off with "don"t tell me it can"t be done because so and so at so and so company couldn"t do it, or they did it and it sucked." Justify the shooting down of any outside the box idea with solid reasoning backed up by data or facts.
What we tend to do as gamers is look at our ideas in a vacuum, not contemplating how "uncool" that cool idea would be after playing it 4 hours a day for 2 years straight. What if WoW had this cool multi-button magic system for casting spells. While on the surface that may seem cool, 8 months into the game is it really cool to have to mix 2 herbs, click two buttons and target a mob body part to cast a magic missile? That get"s old and "uncool" if it"s a significant part of your action in every melee you encounter.
Not to mention this. How much is that "cool" idea going to cost in dev time, and money? And as important, if not moreso, what is the return on that investment? How many more subs is that bad ass tinkering trade skill going to bring to your game? It"s going to cost 900 man hours to create, times those man hour salaries, which will give it a tangible legitimate production value. Is it going to bring in that much or more in the way of customers?
You can"t "monetize" every aspect. At the core the basic gameplay, story, all of it, needs to be the draw and the thing that keeps a grip on your customers, that won"t ever change, but when you start talking "cool" and "unique" things, you cross over into the world of feature creep at some point and it"s the leads responsibility to stop it dead, regardless of whether it"s Curt Schilling the Founder, Todd McFarlane the Artistic Visionary, or R.A. Salvatore, the Creator of Worlds giving the input. Someone somewhere has to see it for what it is, and run with the new cool creative stuff, and put a kabosh on anything that isn"t.
One of our philosophies, well Brett"s to be exact, is rapid prototyping. We are in the midst of producing vertical slices, deep vertical slices, of game play, to allow us the largest amount of time possible to determine the fun factor. If you can get systems up and running years out of launch, and those systems are fun as hell day one, and still fun in year two, then it"s fun!
If that cool idea and concept is bland and boring 8 months later, don"t lie to yourself and think players will still be having fun with it, they won"t.