I appreciate your responses. To be more specific:
There will be 3 people working on this first-person shooter. We are Computer Science majors at the University of Utah but have never done anything like this before. It will be for our Senior Project which is due at the end of Spring Semester 2005. My brother works for the studio that makes EA's Tiger Woods golf, so hopefully we can glean something from them. At this point we have decided to use Direct X, Maya, C++, and Photoshop, mainly because that is what they use at my brother's studio. It will be developed for the PC so we have a little more freedom with polycount and textures. Hopefully this new information makes it easier to respond.
-TDO