"From crunch to mistreatment allegations, many of the issues at TT Games came to a head during the development of
The Skywalker Saga. One reason why: Around the time the project kicked off in late 2017, management
made the unpopular decision to develop the game on a new engine called NTT.
Sources tell Polygon that employees inside the studio had been pushing hard for TT to switch to the Unreal Engine, with a small group even creating a Lego Star Wars test in the software. This was well received internally by those who saw it, according to both current and former staff, but management decided to continue developing the project on NTT, in an attempt to avoid paying engine licensing costs — Lego games often ship on a large number of platforms, and each of those adds to the expense. This was despite warnings about some of the problems NTT might cause.
“Everyone was like, ‘We have new programmers, why are we not using this technology?’” says one former employee. “We have all this crazy technology, Unreal is [charging lower fees] than ever before on their stuff, and people know how to use Unreal. Why are we not using this technology instead of creating something that is unfinished and being forced into production and is going to give really terrible final results?”
Members of the team say that in practice, when they got their hands on NTT, it was unstable and missing features. Tasks like adding animations that would take two minutes in the old engine could take 10 minutes or longer this time around, depending on how many times the engine crashed. It also resulted in hours of work vanishing if the engine didn’t save properly. New engines typically arrive with teething issues, but several former employees wondered why the company had taken this risk on such a high-profile project.
To add to this, staff say that much of the pre-production on
The Skywalker Saga had been done with the old engine in mind. That created problems when trying to implement the game’s design, as assets and animation had to be reexported and reintegrated.
According to some staffers, the struggles with the new engine were the straw that broke the camel’s back.
...
Over the last few months, we have heard of some positive steps at TT.
Multiple sources close to the company say TT will no longer be using NTT on future projects, finally agreeing to switch to Unreal Engine, which some view as a potential step forward."
https://www.polygon.com/features/22...-saga-has-led-to-extensive-crunch-at-tt-games
So we've got reports of complaints about the engine being used from four months ago. Sounds like the engine was in pretty "bad shape" to me.