Modelling for next gen games

I thought I would post my progress on the tutorial I am working on, which as the title suggests is giving me some more of an insight into modelling characters for next gen games (ultimately what I would like to be doing with my time). The character screen shot below is about half way though making the "low poly" mesh as it were. As it stands it has about 4000 triangles, out of the 10000 allocated for the model. This is quite a lot (equivelant of 5000 quads), but nowadays game characters are ranging from 3000 triangles anything up to 15000. Obviously depending on hardware and the engine they are running in. I began by blocking the character in with basic shapes and slowly adding more detail, the abdomen, waist and leg are still in their block forms and I am just starting to detail the lower arms. One thing that a lot of people have found strange about modelling for games is not pressing the "3" key in maya to see the mesh smoothed (this is a bad idea) as it effectively doubles your polygon count and normally gives you far too much resolution for one character. When making models for production this isn't a problem as all the rendering is done once (and providing you computer is good then alls good) however games are rendered in real time and so there are more considerations. Thats said it doesn't mean games can't look pretty (there are plenty of examples) it just means that whilst you might be limited to 10000 triangles there is a lot you can do with zbrush and normal maps to add extra detail, which will be the next step after I finish this base character. I may also have to remake the character with different topology before I open him up in zbrush.