Yeah, though I find it strange that he wants to share this particular game with me...especially since he knows I don't like it that much. I don't know, maybe he feels that he's...safer perhaps, since I gave him few pointers early on in the game...not that he lacks skill, for example, he just told me today that he finished Cuphead, and both Portals are among his favourite games....so who knows.

Important part is he's enjoying it quite a bit, it is now his favourite Zelda...which is quite fine of course, I don't want to influence him that way, though I do tend to point out bad design choices while he's playing it.

If they pull a Majora's Mask and reuse the game engine I could see it being relatively soon. And it's a very solid and fun engine so I'd like to see a sequel using it, both to play with it some more and to see a quick sequel to such a great game.

If they pull a Majora's Mask and reuse the game engine I could see it being relatively soon. And it's a very solid and fun engine so I'd like to see a sequel using it, both to play with it some more and to see a quick sequel to such a great game.

I doubt they'd do that as the engine was built for the Wii U so no doubt will still have limits on it in order to build on BOTW's approach as they'd obviously want to use the full aspects of the Switch hardware, they'll most likely use a customized version of the engine Odyssey uses.

Even if they were able to use the engine again the next game using BOTW's approached would still take long as they have to go over each region in the open world to make sure it has good synergy with the absolute freedom design.

Engines can scale up to stronger hardware; Unreal Engine 3 was originally a last gen engine yet it is used in current gen PS4/Xbone titles like Batman Arkham Knight and Outlast II. Havok Physics, which incidentally BOTW uses, began life back in the 6th gen but is still used in PS4 games.

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.

Did you tell him he's wrong and that he doesn't understand the finer nuances of The Witcher 3 and RDR2? joking 

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.