Halo developer 343 Industries rebrands as "Halo Studios" and confirms multiple Unreal Engine games are in the works
343 Industries, the main developer of the Halo series since the early 2010s, has announced that it will rebrand as Halo Studios and is currently working on multiple games in Unreal Engine.
The details:
The studio revealed the rebrand at the Halo World Championship on Sunday, giving fans their first look at Project Foundry, which is essentially a tech demo. The six-minute Project Foundry video showcases various classic Halo locales built within UE5, and while they are not from an actual game, it does demonstrate what is possible with the engine, which will now be used for all future Halo releases.
The latest mainline Halo title, Halo Infinite, was built in-house using the Slipspace Engine, which was reported to have contributed to the year-long delay, technical issues, and little post-launch content after its release in 2021. It was claimed in early 2023 that the decision to switch to Unreal occurred in 2022, with 343 canceling plans for campaign DLC and leaving some completed multiplayer modes unreleased due to bugs.
In an accompanying blog post, Halo Studios head Pierre Hintze suggests that the switch will allow the studio to deliver content much faster. “We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed – the expectations of how fast their content is available,” he said. “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 art director Chris Matthews also stated that while 343 was still working on the engine, some of its components were "almost 25 years old," and Unreal already has features that "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,” Matthews said. “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.”
With the switch to UE5, the studio hopes that it will be faster and easier to bring new employees on board as they will no longer have to learn a new engine. As for the projects themselves, Hintze has hinted that fans may be waiting a while before any new details are revealed. “We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, at scale,” Hintze 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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