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Wyrdness on 02 November 2018
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curl-6 said:
Wyrdness said:

Havok is more a module engine that can be added to overall engines to handle physics tbh it's not really the whole engine true some engines scale up but the's only so far that can go plus UE is an engine built generally for a broad range of hardware that utilizes certain architecture the engines Zelda games have used have been in house ones built specifically for the hardware as is the case with BOTW as well. Being built for Wii U specifically BOTW's engine may be limited in utilizing a number of the features the more modern architecture the Switch has which is more in line with other platforms, more than likely they'll go for Odyssey's engine and customize it rather than reworking the old engine and possibly add Havok for physics again.

BOTW's engine is already up and running on the Switch though, so it makes much more sense to use it again. An engine does not need to be designed from the ground up specifically for a system to make use of its hardware.

Many old engines can run on newer hardware it doesn't mean they're making use of the architecture and hardware or that they'll run fine when upscaled, BOTW for example was ported to Switch in a few months according to Aonuma so it's running on NS mainly because it's more powerful than Wii U not because the engine making full use of the hardware and architecture.

An engine may not need to be designed for the hardware but it really has to be designed for the architecture types of the hardware to be of any good BOTW's engine isn't as far as new architecture goes because it's designed for a platform that had an architecture that doesn't factor in modern shaders, optimization techniques etc... It makes more sense to use an engine that is more recently designed for modern architecture otherwise you end up like Bethesda in Fallout 4 where because the engine was not designed for a number of new techniques of modern architecture it has a hard time and any modern hardware struggles running the game due to the out of date engine coding even if the game is not as demanding as other games on the platform.

Nintendo themselves will be aware of this which is why they always create a new in house engine for each new platform to use for new installments of games like Mario and Zelda an example being how Skyward Sword didn't use TP's engine despite the latter also running on Wii (even Smash Ultimate chose to create a new ground up engine over reusing S4's), this is how they have gotten the most out of their platforms over the years through ground up engines built solely for the platforms and their features it may take longer but the results are often better. Odyssey's engine is a far better choice as it's already built solely for the Switch and was in development for years to suit the platform so a fair amount of work is already done it's likely even be less work to use it then to refit BOTW's engine because of this.

Last edited by Wyrdness - on 02 November 2018