I'm lead programmer in a medium-sized indie game studio. This is our first game as a team. We're working on a futuristic FPS game, with a profit-sharing buisness plan.

Anyway, we have some very good programmers, who have the ability to create never-seen-before features (true realistic fluids, procedural mesh destruction, procedural skyboxes, etc.) And I'm wondering is there any point to implementing these things? They take a long time, but look brilliant. We're aiming for a 12 month development cycle. So should we do this, or just make a standard game.