I’m employed in Film and currently “stood down” while our actors are on strike. On one hand it’s great to have time to hit some of the games I’ve been hoarding, on the other, I may be playing them in a cardboard box come February.
TL;DR: CDPR have opted to shutter their in-house engine, Red Engine (which CP2077 was built on) in favour of a partnership with Unreal. Most of their devs have now switched to Unreal; with only those left on the upcoming CP2077 release still using Red Engine 4.
They have opted to no longer work at all on the Red Engine projects; ergo they either port CP to Unreal (an incomprehensibly large task given that Unreal doesn’t support many features that Red does, or at least not in the way Red does - not a slight on Unreal, simple reality of different engines, especially internal vs external tooling), or cease further development of CP. They opted for the latter.
It’s been a while since I did Xbox memory mapping (One X) but IIRC there is approx 2GB of ram withheld by the system, and then an additional one or two can be recalled by the system for the purposes of running things like background downloads, party chat, video chat. That means that when your game goes to cert it’s checked to be performant under max OS load; so 6GB. This causes lots of issues (and is a pain as even MS’s analytics indicated this was a use case that appeared almost never. From what I have heard since, these TCRs/XRs/FTCs having changed much.
I have, though even MD is getting on for 7 years old now. I don’t think that the series lived up to it’s roots in either title. I found myself feeling very constrained by them; I don’t necessarily mind if I have to play a character (Corvo is great as a Tabula Rasa) but Adam Jensen and his backstory are so fundamentally unlikeable.
The First Person Stealth Sim genre (Thief, Dishonored, etc) has been getting very little love in the last few years. Sadly the Arkane games don’t embrace it anymore; while great Prey was borderline as you really couldn’t control the stealth in many sections, and Deathloop and Red Rain are primarily short action games.