Halo creators 343 Industries are having a bit of a glow-up. They’re now calling themselves Halo Studios, a piece of rhetorical doubling-down that reminds me of those dril tweets about “James Bond, author of James Bond”. They’ve also abandoned the proprietary Slipspace game engine used by Halo Infinite in favour of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, which will be the basis for “multiple new games”. To celebrate the occasion, Halo Studios have released some footage of Project Foundry, an expansive Unreal Engine 5 prototype and spawning vat for actual Halo games, which is billed by the Xbox Newswire as a kind of ur-Halo – “a true reflection of what would be required for a new Halo game using Unreal, and a training tool for how to get there”.
Going by the Foundry video, what’s required of a new Halo game using Unreal is essentially: much the same worlds, much the same props, much the same characters and enemies, but shinier and more detailed, with additional armour scratches and leaves and whatnot – perhaps a touch of bonus swazzle for your plasma sword, some stylishly worn edges for your pistol, a few more snowflakes for your snowdrift. Classic Next Gen larks. “The potential for Halo, right now, is huge”, intones studio head Pierre Hintze at one point, against the backdrop of a developer pointing at a very small dent on Master Chief’s ear.
New helmet dents aside, Halo Studios are switching to Unreal Engine 5 for some fairly straightforward practical reasons. One is that it saves them time creating, updating and maintaining their own tools – as the developers note, parts of the Slipspace engine are technically 25 years old, though I imagine the same is true of Unreal Engine’s latest incarnations. In particular, the developers seemingly want to push out game updates at a faster rate than with Halo Infinite, which launched without certain features such as a proper splitscreen campaign and Forge mode (it never did get splitscreen in the end).
“We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed – the expectations of how fast their content is available,” Hintze comments in the Newswire piece. “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.”
Another reason for the switchover is that it makes hiring and training new staff easier, because Unreal Engine is a popular middleware platform, and far more developers have experience with it than Slipspace.
There are a few specific Unreal Engine bells and whistles that Halo Studios aim to plug into Master Chief’s headslot. “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,” studio art director Chris Matthews explains in the Newswire piece. “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.”
The Project Foundry video shows off three environments – a grassy, mountainous Pacific North West-inspired region reminiscent of both the original Halo and Halo Infinite, a frozen wonderland with some Forerunner stuff jutting out of it, and a world covered in the pustulant emissions of the Flood, Halo’s xenomorphic third faction.
In the Newswire piece, Matthews adds that the developers want to avoid cultivating false expectations with Project Foundry. As such “everything we’ve made is built to the kind of standards that we need to build for the future of our games. We were very intentional about not stepping into tech demo territory. We built things that we truly believe in, and the content that we’ve built – or at least a good percentage of it – could travel anywhere inside our games in the future if we so desire it.”
Hintze insists 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.”
I guess all of this adds up from the perspective of managing future development of Halo games. I can see the utility of building a kind of totemic, central simulation, where novel breeds of Halo might take shape through idle experimentation, and where new developers can cut their teeth on the fundamentals.
Speaking as a once-devoted, now-lapsed Halo player, though, none of this makes me especially enthusiastic for the Halo games to come. It just feels like the usual exercise in More Graphics, covering up familiar triple-A shooting. I don’t see unprecedented advances in promotional videos like these: I see a kind of desperate petrification, as though layer upon layer of embalming glitter were being applied to a mannequin that is slowly collapsing inwards.
As for renaming themselves “Halo Studios” – they’re trying to start a new “chapter”, as Hintze remarks, but taking the name of the series you’ve been working on for 17 years is like marrying your own reflection: it doesn’t exactly suggest an appetite for new horizons. In the context of parent company Microsoft’s on-going “restructuring for growth”, it suggests a desire to play things safe and appease the mothership. Ah well, you’ll always be 343 Industries in my heart, Halo Studios.