Halo developer 343 Industries has rebranded as ‘Halo Studios’, and announced that it’s working on multiple Halo games developed within Unreal Engine 5.
The news was shared during Sunday’s Halo World Championship tournament, in which it debuted a video showing a technical test of various Halo-themed locations running within Unreal. The studio stressed that the footage shown isn’t a game, but a glimpse of what it might be able to achieve within UE5.
A game engine is a framework used for the development of games. As the cost and effort associated with creating an original engine are high, most developers opt for an off-the-shelf solution such as Unreal Engine.
Halo Infinite was developed using 343’s own Slipspace Engine, which was partly blamed for the game’s last-minute, year-long delay and sluggish rollout of post-release content.
Discussing Sunday’s announcements, Halo Studios head Pierre Hintze suggested that the switch to Unreal will help to solve some of those issues.
“We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed – the expectations of how fast their content is available,” he said. “On Halo Infinite, we were developing a tech stack that was supposed to set us up for the future, and games at the same time.”
Studio art director Chris Matthews added: “Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old. Although 343 were developing it continuously, there are aspects of Unreal that Epic has been developing for some time, which are unavailable to us in Slipspace – and would have taken huge amounts of time and resources to try and replicate.
“One of the primary things we’re interested in is growing and expanding our world so players have more to interact with and more to experience. Nanite and Lumen [Unreal’s rendering and lighting technologies] offer us an opportunity to do that in a way that the industry hasn’t seen before. As artists, it’s incredibly exciting to do that work.”
Halo Studios also hopes that switching to Unreal will enable it to more easily recruit new developers and get them up to speed faster.
Alongside the engine change, the rebranded studio claims it’s making changes to its culture, workflow, and how its teams are organized. That includes involving the community in decisions earlier in development, it said.
Studio head Hintze suggested that it will be some time before the public hears about its future Halo projects, stating that he wants the developer to spend less time hyping its projects without substance.
“One of the things I really wanted to get away from was the continued teasing out of possibilities and ‘must-haves’. We should do more and say less. For me, I really think it is important that we continue the posture which we have right now when it comes to our franchise – the level of humility, the level of servitude towards Halo fans.
“We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, at scale. Today, it’s the first step – we’re showing Foundry because it feels right to do so – we want to explain our plans to Halo fans, and attract new, passionate developers to our team. The next step will be talking about the games themselves.”
Since Halo Infinite’s release in 2021, 343 saw several high-profile departures, including longtime franchise director Frank O’Connor, series veteran Joseph Staten, multiplayer creative director Tom French, director of engineering David Berger, studio head Bonnie Ross, and more.
It was also affected by the layoffs across Microsoft’s gaming division.
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