To be fair, they started working on the game before it was discontinued. I'm sure someone made a decision that it made more sense to continue on without support rather than start from scratch.

You can, but on the other hand they've been battling bugs from it with every release. The game is notorious for breaking things constantly. I played for quite a while and the sound engine was always awful with things not in your line of sight frequently not making any noise at all, and every month or two a new major bug relating to host client desyncing is found out by the community who then has to have big campaigns badgering the devs to notice and fix it. Very fun game still but if they had started with a supported engine a lot of stuff would probably work way better

Yeah but what evidence is there that what you describe is an engine problem rather than an Arrowhead can't software engineer problem?

As others point out, several other good games were made on this engine, and they do not have such abysmal engineering quality. Vermintide 2 is on the same engine and very much doesn't have problems with constant bugs and regressions.

Arrowhead struggled to fix the lock on for the missile launcher for months, and then claimed that "raycasts are hard* and I just don't think they should be for a game dev. Several patches seem to show that they just do not test at all the release build, and that they don't seem to have functioning version control to keep from breaking things they've already fixed.

>and every month or two a new major bug relating to host client desyncing is found out by the community who then has to have big campaigns badgering the devs to notice and fix it.

This is not a game engine problem. Does fire damage properly work across multiplayer yet?

If im remembering correctly, I think its a variant of the engine that vermintide and darktide use, some old autodesk-acquired engine. Given the successes of vermintide and darktide, the engine still has plenty of legs left.