Kris, you mention the lack of a robust AI system, are there at least solutions to enhance what’s already there? The only comparison for what we want to achieve with our game is something akin to Skyrim, IE a world that feels lived in, so we would need an AI system that can manage that (apologies if I didn’t mention the AI system bit before, honestly it’s a bit hard to keep everything straight.)
Xerithas, I looked into World Machine, it looks promising, but its restrictions on size in the free version make it a little less than ideal, unfortunately. Either way, it looks like a good product, one that I’ll need to look into a bit more.
Overall, my friend and I have a lot of ideas we want to implement, albeit over time, so any engine we use needs to either have the capacity to grow with us, or have any features we would need out of the box (the latter probably being unrealistic.) UE4 seems promising, and is worth at least trying out. I’m not sure it will be the engine for our game, or for us, but it never hurts to investigate. =-)