Well lets be honest, the writing was on the wall about what MG have been up to. They bought the Kart developer because they used UE4 but their own physics engine. They are marrying UE4 with the rF2 physics engine on the new NASCAR title; and from which, they are pulling expertise from both studios to do so. Next up, BTCC; and then after that, ACO/LeMans title.
Using UE4 seems on the surface to make sense; its after all what SimBin were tasked to do with GTR3 (Sector3 physics, UE4 graphics) but have failed to deliver. And of course there is ACC. The advantage of it is that you can port the game to consoles as well as PCs. But Kunos have alluded to certain problems with mixing UE4 and their physics; and there are some rumors that if they ever produce an AC2, they'll revert to their own graphics engine.
My own experience with ACC, has been pretty poor quite frankly. When you look at the type of games UE4 is used on, and for consoles in general, they are fixed to either 30fps or 60fps, and are generally slow-moving games such as first-person shooters and adventure games, where you slowly travel around an environment with buildings and trees and such, where they don't move quickly and can render with shadows in a decent way. On ACC, the shadows on the trees are terribly distracting - they only start at a certain draw distance and so they pop in, changing tree colors from light to dark constantly as you blast up to them at 150mph not 30mph or 5mph. There's problems with the auto-exposure as well, for the same reasons. In order to try to overcome the shortcomings, and massive fluctuations in fps and stuttering, I've had to lock fps to 84 and massage settings; and this is on a 9th Gen Intel proc and 2070 Nvidia GPU. Performance is crap. And of course, like everyone else I read about what a disaster it to try and run VR with that title, and the inability to retain fps performance.
The question is, what does this mean for rF2? In much the same way as Reiza had to rebuild all their content for the Madness engine, pretty sure S397 would have to do the same were they ever to swap out the graphics for the MG UE4 engine. All mod content instantly obsolete, including those with 3rd party relationships (KartSim, guys who did Alpine etc.). But without this, they've got to maintain full development of the graphics subsystem so they don't fall behind. UE5 is coming soon as well; raytracing; DX12; DLSS or AMDs competitor (allowing to have apparently better resolution that actually being used, upscaling); plus whatever happens with VR. That's a tall order, and I just wonder if MG will want to do it. Or instead, they'll just let the content gradually migrate to the "new" games that are built on the MG engine. I suspect, that'll be the plan. There's also competing Competition Systems to worry about as well, since they aren't using the rF one on the other titles.
