Yeah exactly, he left because he finished the job he was there to do. Now they are acting like this is some kind of move to placate their customers as if it wasn’t the plan all along.
It’s definitely not starting from scratch, it’s just throwing away what they built so far.
To be honest though although I’m not a game dev it does seem like a pretty reasonable decision given presumably the difficulties of maintaining your own engine. This will hopefully allow them to invest more time into different parts of the game and avoid a repeat of the Cyberpunk launch. I wonder if that launch and issues that lead to it was a big part of the drive behind the decision.
That said, I am a bit worried about what seems to be a bit of a consolidation happening with game engines after Unity burning a lot of bridges and now CDPR not moving forward with their in house engine. It’d be nice to see some more competition in this space I think. That’s my layman’s take at least, maybe there are already plenty of options that I’m just not aware of.