by One of the biggest Xbox announcements of 2024 came on Sunday night when Halo developer 343 Industries announced during the Halo World Championship 2024 esports event a rebrand to “Halo Studios” and a shift to Unreal Engine 5 – bringing the Slipspace Engine that the studio had built was stopped. for 2021’s Halo Infinite. Shortly after, it was confirmed that all future Halo games will be built on Epic Games’ tech stack, and it’s already being used as the foundation for multiple projects in active development.
The news was presented in a seven-minute studio update trailer that the developers called “A New Dawn,” which saw several members of the Halo Studios team present Project Foundry – a tech demo built in-house to showcase what many of Halo’s are classic designs and environments. could look like in an Unreal Engine 5 game. What has me Real happy with this switch, however, there are no nice graphics; instead, the stated goal is to “help the team focus on making games, rather than making the tools and engines.”
In an interview on Xbox Wire, several clues from Halo Studios pointed to the fact that “some of Slipspace’s components are almost 25 years old”, and that there was a need for “a large portion of the staff to simply develop and maintain the software “. engine” – confirming much of what was said in a report last year about Slipspace. With the move to Epic’s much more modern engine, developers hope to reorganize their resources and streamline their creation process, ultimately controlling how long it takes before we update the game, bring new content to players, [and] adapting to what we see our players want.”
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Reading those words gave me the first bit of optimism I’ve ever felt for Xbox’s flagship franchise long The biggest reason Halo Infinite failed to capture long-term player interest is because it lacked an adequate content suite for well over a year. Compared to previous Halo releases that launched feature-complete and gave fans plenty of ways to play right away, Halo Infinite’s paltry collection of playlists was frustratingly sparse, even missing beloved modes like Infection, Firefight, and the all-important Forge creation tool cards did not. won’t come until late 2022 or beyond.
I hope that with Unreal Engine 5, Halo Studios can develop future experiences much more efficiently, and hopefully ensure that we never have another Halo 5: Guardians or Halo Infinite situation where a Halo game is released with little offering and only gets full content distributed months or years later. I’m also looking forward to seeing how “aspects of Unreal” that would have taken “enormous amounts of time and resources to try to replicate” in Slipspace, such as the engine’s impressive rendering and lighting technology, future iterations of Halo’s worlds will influence. .
One thing I’m certainly questioning in the wake of Halo Infinite’s troubled development is the studio’s decision to move on to multiple projects, but again, the Unreal shift – along with several recent leadership changes – gives me reason to temper my skepticism. Using “the industry-leading engine” should certainly make onboarding new developers, growing the team, and hiring contractors for outside help easier (Halo Studios has several positions open), although it got particularly tough last year hit by layoffs at Microsoft.
Ultimately, we won’t know if this “new dawn” for Halo will bear fruit until the fruits of Halo Studios’ labor are actually in our hands, and since “a new Halo game isn’t imminent,” it won’t happen for a long time. That said, I think a major shake-up and overhaul of the way it’s developed is something Halo desperately needs, and I’m glad it’s getting it.
Whatever it is next for the legendary sci-fi property will be playable via Xbox Game Pass, like all of Microsoft’s first-party releases. Halo Infinite’s single-player campaign is now accessible via the unlimited subscription service, as is the Master Chief Collection which bundles all pre-Xbox One Halo games into one modernized package.
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