>>719141228
>How?
You don't need an army of developers to make an engine this day (even with AAA quality). In fact, back then, they were countless of proprietary engines, and it was way way way more complicated to make an AAA game on multiplatform with less standardization (PS2/Xbox/GC/PC (add to that the online feature).
You could hire 3/5 guys for a year and let them have a really good engine that come close to UE4/Unity in term of VISUALS, even more knowing that a lot of papers for the most important tech are out there nowadays.

>Such as? There’s CryEngine, but it requires a lot of customization and skilled developers before you can use it properly.
Unity, Unreal Engine 4, Decima (if you have some good contacts) etc...

>2D engines are a joke, you can make 1:1 copies of most 2D games in JavaScript
Indies =/= 2D. Cf, pic related.