As if that wasn’t enough, the studio has also changed technology, ditching their existing engine…

Back in October, Ains, the editor-in-chief of the Seasoned Gaming podcast, claimed that 343 Industries was working on a new Halo game using Unreal Engine 5, with a single-player campaign that would be years away. According to him, this is due to a reorganization at the studio. In other words, Halo Infinite was the only game they had that used the Slipspace engine, which means they’ve been working on it for years for essentially nothing (CD Projekt RED used the REDengine in three games!).

On Twitter, Idle Sloth, an Xbox insider, shared two pictures from LinkedIn. In one of the pictures, Justin Dinges, former art director at 343 Industries, wrote that he was working on the next, yet-to-be-announced Halo game between April 2022 and March 2023. Prior to that, he was the director and art director for Halo Infinite, and worked as an environment artist for Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians. Another interesting fact can be found on Ian Slutz’s profile. He is the Senior Character Systems Designer “working on player systems and assets in Unreal Engine 5”.

By the way, Jez Corden wrote the Slipspace Engine abandonment for Windows Central last October, so maybe Slutz’s work is no coincidence. So, when can we expect the next Halo game? Maybe it’s years away, but if they started working on it in 2022, maybe they didn’t have to throw everything out due to the change in technology.

Whenever the new Halo comes out, something has to be announced. Halo is no longer the jewel in Microsoft’s crown. It’s not 2007 (when Halo 3 was a huge boost for the Xbox 360 and became a mainstream game!), and since then Microsoft has bought a lot of companies and studios (including Activision Blizzard King with Call of Duty…), so they won’t have just a few big launches, but rather a lot of small ones.

Source: WCCFTech