Limitations of the engine... a purely speculative topic, for the most part. Modders might have something to say about it, but the rest of us... We haven't seen the source code, so how could we know? And even if we did, it won't tell us much, because it's literally megabytes of text, split across hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of files. And it's C++, which is not the most pleasant thing to read.
Clearly, some signs point to Larian becoming a victim of its own past success. The seemingly simple things which are still absent from the game, like the aforementioned Dodge, the way they implemented multi-attacks for Gith patrol, the reactions we have - unless
someone at Larian is hell-bent on never doing things right the first time around, no other explanations except for the engine appear to be plausible.
Figuratively speaking, how difficult it could be to take a railroad engine, and cut it down to a helicopter using only rasps? Well, that's what Larian has been busy with for the last several years, as far as I understand. (That, and cinematics of course).
The bad thing about the current situation is that, normally the company should have been able to expand and modify the engine to meet the core requirements, considering how much time they had for it. The fact that we still don't see any of it could be explained by only a few possible reasons, I think:
- 1. They have no capacity to do it, because (as I'm pretty sure) their engine is one huge chthonic bolt-on mess, architecturally. Why I'm so sure of it? Because products that are well designed are exceedingly rare, and immediately become huge hits in the industry, being licensed to other devs and quickly taking over the market. The stuff they have, it's probably easier to flush it down the toilet and write a new one from scratch (and with luck, it will be better designed this time).
- 2. They have no desire to do it, and aim for the "pig in a poke" strategic gameplay. Since this doctrine is considered Evil, its application will have corresponding consequences for the company - assuming they are actually playing it, and I sincerely hope they don't.
- 3. They have no capacity to do it, because of #1 and because they lost their top C++ devs. If that's the case, the engine is already doomed, because no one at the company understands it well enough to introduce necessary changes (hell, any changes) without breaking absolutely everything else in the process. Still, it looks and smells good enough for just one quick cash grab (which will be even easier than usual this time because brand recognition works in their favour). Kind of a mixture of #1 + #2.
Would love to be proved wrong.