Originally Posted by
TesalionLortus
[...] switching the engine wouldn't be an ultimate solution here. Well, firstly because they don't have resources for it, technically, so we're just theorizing anyway, but to make my point - it's undeniable that most of the vistas on the Unreal presentation are really captivating and structures gain a lot of depth, same for grasses, mountain peaks and rocks, some of the trees. On the other hand, mostly anything viewed up-close is not overall such a big improvement, plus the game loses some of its unique art style charm that makes it feel more like a painting - some of these regular trees are particularly generic and not exactly captivating, whereas in the game engine they would be more colorful and stylistic, especially if you have some reshade at play, I would even say the same about grasses (even though their animation in Unreal is certainly such a wonder). Overall, the Unreal take also emits this vibe of being stuck between the next fancy MMO out of Japan and something else that's not exactly well-defined, with a hyper photo-realistic model feel but not exactly an alive world. Granted, it's not a fully functional game with environmental effects of course, just a presentation.
Now, lightning, immersive colorful fires, view distance, more detail, more color at places, more depth (due to how lightning and details work), working shadows that don't actually flicker all the time when you move around... all of these things could work pretty well, with significant overall improvements for the game's graphics, if they were actually implemented in the vanilla game engine. That's why I say engine transition wouldn't be generally an ultimate and the only solution to actually improve the game's graphics in a way that matters. I guess you could achieve major improvements just be tweaking the internal shaders and introducing shader improvements to the actual game engine (but then you also get to keep its unique charm).
Oh, but I do enjoy this wonderful reconstruction nonetheless, amazing work sir! It does show how much more immersive things could have been if we could see distant mountains of Mordor, for example. But if they were ever to do that, increase a view distance, they would need to do that in chosen places with chosen things - I don't want to see Minas Morgul from Minas Tirith or Edoras/Isengard from Helm's Deep, that would be silly and immersion-breaking.