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Halo and developer 343 Industries are resetting, with some foundational changes coming to the iconic franchise. All future Halo games will be developed in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, with multiple new projects currently in development, 343 Industries announced Sunday. Marking a “new chapter” for the series, the Microsoft-owned new studio is also rebranding to Halo Studios, bringing in widespread changes to its functioning.
Multiple Halo Games in Development
At Halo World Championship, 343 debuted new Halo footage rendered in Unreal Engine 5, showing off three different environments and series protagonist Master Chief. The footage, 343 said, is not from a Halo game in development, but part of a “Foundry” project that will serve as a foundation for future Halo games.
The studio confirmed the multiple Halo games, built in Unreal Engine 5, were in development, but stopped short of providing any timelines for those titles. 343 last worked on Halo Infinite, which launched in 2021.
Halo environments rendered in Unreal Engine 5
Photo Credit: Microsoft/ Halo Studios
Switch to Unreal Engine 5
In addition to the changes coming to Halo, 343 announced that it was reorganising and changing its name to Halo Studios to reflect the new beginning for the franchise. With a switch to Unreal Engine, the developer will focus more on crafting games instead of spending time on refining their own Slipspace Engine.
“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” Chris Matthews, art director at the studio, said in an Xbox Wire post. “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,” he added.
343, now Halo Studios, intends to shorten development times for future projects. The developer said it had to allocate a sizable portion of its staff to develop and fine-tune the Slipspace engine on previous projects. “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,” studio head Pierre Hintze said.
The developer is also reorganising and expanding, setting up multiple teams to work on different Halo games simultaneously. While the Project Foundry footage sets the tone for what’s to come, don’t expect a Halo game to launch soon. Hintze said the studio will talk about the games in time.
“We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, at scale,” he said. “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.”
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