Microsoft’s former flagship franchise has also moved to the Unreal Engine, and at the same time, the studio behind Halo has taken on a new name.

Formerly known as 343 Industries, the team is now known as Halo Studios. There are several Halo games in development at the same time, all of which will be developed using Unreal Engine 5. The previously used Slipspace engine will no longer be used because it required too much staff to maintain. The studio says the change in technology will help them create games that fans will enjoy and allow them to develop multiple projects at the same time.

Halo Studios has created Project Foundry to showcase the future of Halo. It’s not a game and not a tech demo, but rather a way to explore what they can do with the franchise using Unreal Engine 5 and training. The team didn’t reveal any details about the projects in the works, and Halo Infinite will continue to be supported on the Slipspace engine, as more updates to the Operations and Forge modes will be coming.

“If you really break down Halo, there were two very different chapters. Chapter 1: Bungie. Chapter 2: 343 Industries. Now I think we have an audience that is hungry for more. So we’re not just trying to improve the efficiency of development, we’re trying to change the recipe of how we make Halo games. So today we begin a new chapter. We believe that players’ consumption habits have changed – their expectations of how quickly their content is available. With Halo Infinite, we built a technology stack that should set us up for the future, while also making games,” said Pierre Hintze, head of Halo Studios, in a statement. Halo Studios Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth van Wyck added, “The way we’ve made Halo games in the past doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future. So part of the conversation we had was about how we can help the team focus on making games rather than making tools and engines.”

Studio Art Director Chris Matthews stated, “With all due respect, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old. Although 343 has been developing it continuously, there are aspects of Unreal that Epic has been developing for some time that are not available to us in Slipspace – and would have taken an enormous amount of time and resources to replicate. One of the main things we’re interested in is growing and expanding our world to give players more to interact with and more to experience. Nanite and Lumen [Unreal’s rendering and lighting technologies] give us the ability to do that in a way that the industry hasn’t seen before. As an artist, it’s incredibly exciting to do this work.

Where this kind of work has been done in the past, across the industry, there can be a lot of smoke and mirrors. It sometimes leads players down paths where they think it’s going to be one thing and then something else happens. The ethos of Foundry is the exact opposite of that. Everything we’ve done has been built to the kind of standards we need to build for the future of our games. We were very intentional about not going into tech demo territory. We’ve built things that we really believe in, and the content that we’ve built, or at least a good percentage of it, could go anywhere in our games in the future if we wanted to.”

Hintze added, “It’s fair to say that our intention is that most of what we show in Foundry will be in projects that we are building or will be building in the future. One of the things I really wanted to get away from was the continued teasing out of possibilities and must-haves. We should be doing more and saying less. I think it is really important that we continue the attitude that we have right now when it comes to our franchise – the level of humility, the level of servitude to the Halo fans. We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, on a large scale. Today is the first step – we’re showing the Foundry because it feels right – we want to explain our plans to Halo fans and attract new, passionate developers to our team. The next step is to talk about the games themselves. We have been disproportionately focused on trying to set the stage for a successful Halo Infinite. [But moving to Unreal] allows us to put all of our focus on creating a variety of new experiences at the highest possible quality.”

So they have a pretty concrete vision, which is good. The question is how successful they will be after the technology change. And that’s why it will take more time for the new Halo to come out…

Source: Gematsu, Microsoft