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 multiple new Halo games currently in development, the studio announced.
“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters,” said Halo Studios head Pierre Hintze in a statement. “Chapter 1: Bungie. Chapter 2: 343 Industries. Now, I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. So we’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games. So, we start a new chapter today.”
Halo games previously ran on Halo Studios’ proprietary Slipspace Engine, which required a large portion of staff to upkeep.
“We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed—the expectations of how fast their content is available,” said Hintze. “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.”
Halo Studios chief operating officer Elizabeth van Wyck added, “The way we made Halo games before 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 help the team focus on making games, versus 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 simultaneously.
Studio art director Chris Matthews explained, “Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old. Although 343 were developing it continuously, there are aspects of Unreal that Epic has been developing for some time, which are unavailable to us in Slipspace—and would have taken huge amounts of time and resources to try and replicate.
“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. 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. As artists, it’s incredibly exciting to do that work.”
To showcase what the future of Halo will look like, Halo Studios created “Project Foundry,” which is not a neither a game nor a tech demo, but an exploration of what is possible for a Halo game in Unreal Engine 5, as well as a training tool for how to get there.
“Where this type of work’s been done historically, across the industry, it can contain a lot of smoke and mirrors,” explained Matthews. “It sometimes leads players down paths where they believe it’s going to be one thing, and then something else happens. The ethos of Foundry is vigorously the opposite of that.
“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 added, “It’s fair to say 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.”
As for what is to come for the Halo series, while Halo Studios is not talking specifics about the new games in development quite yet, it did say that a new
“One of the things I really wanted to get away from was the continued teasing out of possibilities and ‘must-haves,’” Hintze said. “We should do more and say less. For me, I really think it is important that we continue the posture which we have right now when it comes to our franchise—the level of humility, the level of servitude towards Halo fans.
“We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, at scale. Today, it’s the first step–we’re showing Foundry because it feels right to do so—we want to explain our plans to Halo fans, and attract new, passionate developers to our team. The next step will be talking about the games themselves.
“We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite. [But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible.”
Watch the “New Dawn” developer video featuring “Project Foundry” below.