There’s no denying the fact that the last couple of years have been a wild one for the Halo franchise. Halo Infinite was supposed to revive the franchise and even brought an incredible campaign to the table, but it still managed to fail player expectations due to a lack of content. Players believed that it was the end of the road for the iconic franchise, and Microsoft would divert its resources somewhere else now.
However, the tech giant is now looking to usher in a brand-new era for the franchise. During Sunday’s Halo World Championship, gamers were treated to a first look at the new Halo Studios, the new moniker for developer 343 Industries, and its first project in the pipeline, currently codenamed Project Foundry. With its latest project, Halo Studios clearly wants to avoid the same blunders as Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws.
As of now, Project Foundry is being presented as neither a tech demo nor a full-blown entry in the franchise. It’s a way to give us a look at what’s possible for the Halo franchise with the studio’s brand-new direction. It brings many familiar aspects of the series, including Master Chief next to Forerunner architecture.
What’s really interesting about Project Foundry is that its visuals are being generated by Unreal Engine 5. That’s right, after dumping millions of dollars into Slipspace Engine, the studio has decided to abandon it to broaden the horizon of the Halo franchise.
In an interview, Studio Art director Chris Matthews stated that with Project Foundry and Unreal Engine’s capabilities, developers want to deliver a game that stands true to its initial promises.
Where this type of work’s been done historically, across the industry, it can contain a lot of smoke and mirrors. It sometimes leads players down paths where they believe it’s going to be one thing, and then something else happens. The ethos of Foundry is vigorously the opposite of that.
Over the years, we’ve seen many demos that ultimately failed to deliver when they were released. One such example is Star Wars Outlaws. If you’ve forgotten, during the game’s demo run, Ubisoft stated that the game would truly revolutionize the open-world action genre with various new features and additions and give an excellent time for the fans of the Star Wars franchise.
However, we all know how that turned out to be. Outlaws proved to be a major flop due to the fact that it didn’t bring any new revolutionary aspect that Ubisoft had promised and instead featured the same-old boring formula that’s been plaguing the French publisher’s titles for years.
Outlaws was such a disaster that Ubisoft’s share prices fell to a ten-year low, and now it’s on the verge of being purchased by Tencent.
One of the biggest talking points for the new era of Halo is the switch to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. The developers have already confirmed that multiple new Halo games are in the pipeline, and they’ll be crafted using the Unreal Engine 5. This is quite a departure from Infinite, which was developed using 343 Industries’ Slipspace Engine.
So, why has the development team suddenly switched to Unreal Engine 5? Well, it’s due to a lot of factors. According to the developers, the previous development methods using Slipspace Engine simply aren’t efficient anymore and don’t align with their goals for the future of the franchise.
Halo Studios wants to focus on crafting quality experiences for gamers instead of maintaining its own in-house engine. The Slipspace Engine is nearly 25 years old at this point, and it has hindered the development of even Infinite.
Unreal Engine 5 brings many advanced technologies, such as Nanite and Lumen, which have shown their capabilities with recent releases such as Hellblade 2. Replicating these for Slipspace Engine to enhance Halo games would’ve certainly taken a lot of resources.
Unreal Engine 5 is currently the industry standard and is well popular among developers. The studio believes that this factor of familiarity will help them bring developers on board who wouldn’t have to learn a new engine from scratch, which will lead to smoother development cycles.
With that said, what would you like to see for the future of the Halo franchise? Let us know in the comments below.
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