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

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new techniques of modern architecture it has a hard time and any modern hardware struggles running the game due to the out of date engine coding even if the game is not as demanding as other games on the platform.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.

Engines aren't limited the specs and techniques of the first platform they're used on, hence why many engines scale between multiple platforms of different generations. And was it ever actually confirmed that Odyssey's engine was built for Switch? I don't recall ever reading that, it could simply be an updated 3D World engine.