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curl-6 on 21 May 2019
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Pemalite said:

Unreal Engine 2.5. But it was modified and added a ton of new effects to water, lighting and shadowing. - Helped rewrite some shaders for Bioshock back in the day to enable backwards compatibility on older GPU's just like with Oblivion.

In theory Bioshock 1 and 2 could have been ported to the Original Xbox as the engine was capable of running on that hardware really well

I don't doubt they could have; speaking in purely mechanical terms Bioshock 1/2 weren't highly complex games in terms of having huge levels with lots of moving parts or tons of characters on screen, all you'd need to do was massively cut back on graphical fidelity and maybe break up the levels with loading screens like in Doom 3. The original Xbox ran a port of Half-Life 2 after all.

Still, I'm glad they came to the 7th gen instead as the increased graphical power allowed for a more atmospheric experience. The beautiful, creepy, haunting visuals were a big part of what made Bioshock so incredible, as such I can't help but feel they couldn't have lived up to their proper potential on 6th gen hardware.

Mr Puggsly said:
curl-6 said:

Probably not much left from the early build in terms of graphics, but it's amazing how long legacy code can hang around in an engine; I read a Treyarch dev during the 7th gen say the COD engine circa 2009 still contained remnants from the original Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.

And yeah, Blacklist's use of UE2 as late as 2013 was quite an interesting oddity, especially as, yeah, it looks damn good considering. It's a similar situation to how this year's Mortal Kombat 11 still runs on a heavily modified UE3. A lot of the time when devs have years worth of work invested in their own customized version of an older engine they can be loathe to part with it simply cos it saves them so much time and money to have a lot of their work already in place from past games.

In regard to UE3, I think I would have liked to seen more developers using that over UE4.

Arkham Knight, Outlast 2 and Mortal Kombat 11 are actually some of the best looking games this gen and run at a high resolution. UE4 though, its really a mixed bag and has games running at 720p on a base X1. It seems to me UE3 would have been sufficient for numerous UE4 games, would have delivered comparable visuals with better resolutions and likely better load times.

The premium consoles do see significant improvments on premium consoles, but sometimes its just for 1080p like on the PS4 Pro. There are exceptions though, I consider Gears 4, Crackdown 3, Fortnite and Days Gone impressive. I'm sure there are other technically notable games using UE4.

On a side note, it possible moving a game from UE3 to UE4 isn't too difficult. However, the Batman remasters showed a simple port would have been better. While Gears of War: Ultimate is basically a great port and engine "upgrade" with improved visuals. Probably could have been 60 fps if they stuck with UE3 though.

While I agree that UE3 has shown some excellent results on current gen hardware, (Outlast II especially) I'd also say UE4 has produced some beautiful games like Hellblade and Yoshi's Crafted World.