by Xbox Game Studios subsidiary 343 Industries is changing its name to Halo Studios, and all future Halo projects will be built in Unreal Engine 5, including several new ones Halo games currently in development, the studio announced.
‘If you really break down Halo downwards there have been two very different chapters,” said Pierre Hintze, head of Halo Studios, in a statement. “Chapter 1: Bungie. Chapter 2: 343 Industries. I think we have an audience that is hungry for more. So we’re not only going to try to improve the efficiency of development, but also change the recipe for how we make Halo games. So today we start a new chapter.”
Halo games previously ran on Halo Studios’ proprietary Slipspace Engine, which required a large portion of the workforce.
“We believe that gamers’ consumption habits have changed: expectations about how quickly their content is available,” Hintze said. “On Halo Infinitywe were developing a tech stack that would prepare us for the future, and at the same time for games.”
Halo Studios Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth van Wyck added: “The way we made it Halo games from the past don’t necessarily work that well for the way we want to make games for the future. So part of the conversation we had was about how we help the team focus on making games, rather than making the tools and the engines.”
Adopting Unreal Engine 5 also means Halo Studios can create games with a focus that can satisfy fans, even setting up multiple games to create different games at the same time.
Studio art director Chris Matthews explains: “Respectfully, some of the components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old. Although 343 has been continuously developing it, there are aspects of Unreal that Epic has been working on for a while that aren’t available to us in Slipspace – and would have taken enormous amounts of time and resources to try to replicate.
“One of the main things we’re interested in is growing and expanding our world so players can interact and experience more. Nanite and Lumen [Unreal’s rendering and lighting technologies] offer us the opportunity to do that in a way the industry hasn’t seen before. As artists, it is incredibly exciting to do that work.”
To show where the future lies Halo will look like, Halo Studios has created ‘Project Foundry’, which is not a game or tech demo, but an exploration of what is possible for a Halo game in Unreal Engine 5, as well as a training tool to get there.
“Where this type of work has been done historically across the industry, it can involve a lot of smoke and mirrors,” Matthews explains. “It sometimes leads players down paths where they think it’s going to be one thing, and then something else happens. Foundry’s ethos is powerfully the opposite of that.
“Everything we’ve created is built to the kind of standards we need to build for the future of our games. We were very conscious of not going into technology demo territory. We’ve built things we really believe in, and the content we’ve built – or at least a good percentage of it – can end up anywhere in our games in the future if we want it to.”
Hintze added: “It’s fair to say that our intention is that the majority of what we’ve shown in Foundry is expected to happen in projects we’re building, or in future projects.”
As for what’s to come for the Halo series, while Halo Studios isn’t yet providing details on the new games in development, it did say there is a new
“One of the things I really wanted to get away from was the constant teasing of possibilities and ‘must-haves,’” Hintze said. “We need to do more and say less. For me, I really think it’s important that we continue the attitude that we have now when it comes to our right to vote – the level of humility, the level of service to Halo fans.
“We need to talk about things when we have things to talk about, on a grand scale. Today is the first step – we’re featuring Foundry because it feels good to do so – we want to explain our plans to Halo fans, and attract new, passionate developers to our team. The next step is talking about the games themselves.
“We had a disproportionate focus on creating the conditions to be successful in service delivery Halo Infinity. [But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all our focus on creating multiple new experiences with the highest possible quality.”
Watch the ‘New Dawn’ developer video featuring ‘Project Foundry’ below.
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