We were recently able to report that 343 Industries no longer exists, but has now undergone a name and strategy change and is now called Halo Studios, which gives a possibly even clearer indication of what they will be working on in the future.
And it’s a lot apparently, because representatives from the studio confirmed during the 2024 Halo World Championship that it involves several new titles. But… we almost expected that, and perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that a persistent rumour from the past two years has now been confirmed. Just as several leaks and insiders have said, Halo will be developed with Unreal Engine 5 going forward.
Via Xbox Wire, it is now confirmed that “all future Halo projects will use the engine”, and already now it is announced that “multiple new games using it are in development”.
This is of course a huge change. Their Slipspace game engine has components that are almost 25 years old in it, so it’s clearly time for something new. Studio head Pierre Hintze even says it will be a whole new chapter for the Halo universe:
“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters. Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2 – 343 Industries. Now, I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. So we’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games. So, we start a new chapter today.”
Another thing Halo Studios wants to emphasise is how difficult it has been to find people who can work with their old technology, where no one knows Slipspace beforehand. Therefore, new employees first have to spend a long time with this before they can move on to making game content. As if that wasn’t enough, the studio has to continuously build and improve its graphics engine instead of being able to spend more time on the actual games.
Chief operating officer Elizabeth van Wyck says that “part of the conversation we had was about how we help the team focus on making games, versus making the tools and the engines”, and continues:
“How long does it take to ramp somebody up to be able to actually create assets that show up in your game?”
If you watch the video below where all of this is presented, we get to see graphics from something Halo Studios calls Project Foundry. This isn’t a game, but something they’ve been playing around with to explore Unreal Engine 5. That doesn’t mean we should forget about having any of this in a future game, as Hintze concludes:
“It’s fair to say that our intent is that the majority of what we showcased in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects.”
We note that a lot of design is familiar from Halo: Combat Evolved, where there have been rumours of an upcoming remake. Whether there is any truth to this, we don’t know, but would say that the chances of it being real have increased after the images and video below.
What do you hope Halo Studio’s first Unreal Engine 5 project will be?