Halo adopting Unreal Engine 5, 343 Studios changes names, and more

Lots of news hit this week for Halo fans, including the series’ adoption of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, and a tease of what might be.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Coming off of 2021’s Halo Infinite, Microsoft has indeed set about making some big changes for its premier franchise. The most recent entry in the storied Halo franchise of first-person shooters, Infinite wasn’t a bad game by any means.

We actually loved what it offered with an open world of action and some impressive visuals, but it didn’t seem to move the proverbial needle in quite the way that the tech giant had hoped. So what’s a company to do? Well, make some changes, that’s what. And from the looks of what’s cooking, they’re likely for the better.

Microsoft made a series of reveals this week, with the biggest being that Halo would be moving from the proprietary Slipspace Engine to the Unreal Engine 5. As alterations go, it’s big change, but one that makes plenty of sense. After all, a good chunk of the industry uses UE5 at present, a technology that includes elements that Slipspace just doesn’t.

And creating those same elements in Halo’s former engine would just take too long, according to Halo Studios’ Art Director, Chris Matthews.

“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” explains Studio Art Director, Chris Matthews. “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.”

Microsoft press release

Change the name, change the game

So yes, as you can see above, 343 is officially history as a studio name. In its place is the aptly named “Halo Studios“, a development house that will carry the brand forward into its bold new age in a few ways. The press release on Xbox News Wire openly talks about the above shift to Unreal Engine 5 as having the by-product of more easily acclimating artistic talent.

With the UE5, there’s more or less no on-ramp period, where new artists would have had to learn the old Slipspace engine. Instead, they can theoretically just settle in and get to the business of making new Halo experiences come to life.

To that end, Halo Studios created Project Foundry. That’s not a game, but is instead a massively beefed up demo that was built with all the trappings of a new game. Why so much effort? Simply put, Project Foundry is meant to explore what Halo can be with Unreal Engine 5. From the looks of the video above too, which owes its ‘in-game’ visuals to Foundry, it’s making its point pretty plainly.

With that new speed we mentioned too, BG has to wonder if we might be seeing a time where multiple Halo projects might be going at once. This is purely conjecture, but what fan of the Master Chief wouldn’t want to see Halo Studios produce a full UE5 remake of Halo: Combat Evolved, with a fresh sequel and maybe even something like an ODST followup seeing development right alongside it? We know we would. Again though, are all just our own dreams, though we’re hyped thinking about the possibilities.

Want to read way (way) more about all of the above? Check out the Xbox News Wire post. It’s expansive and covers everything we highlighted here, plus a plethora of additional content. One of the biggest FPS franchises of all time, Halo looks like it’s far from winding down, and instead looks to be entering a beautiful new age.