Microsoft is making some major changes that will have a massive effect on its flagship Xbox game franchise, Halo. Today, the company revealed that 343 Industries, its in-house game development team that has been making games in the series since Halo 4 in 2012, is getting a new name: Halo Studios.
However, this is not just a name change for this team. As the Xbox Wire site reveals, Halo Studios is also ditching its in-house Slipspace graphics engine. For its future games, it will now use Epic"s Unreal Engine 5.
The article quotes the team"s Studio Art Director, Chris Matthews, on why it has decided to move on from Slipspace. That engine was created primarily for the team"s last game, Halo Infinite, but it still used elements of the Blam engine that was created by Bungie for the original Halo game way back in 2001.
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.
The use of Unreal Engine 5 also means that Halo Studios can now hire people to work on future games who have already used Epic"s engine and tools, rather than having them train to use the Slipspace engine and tools.
The team worked on what the article called Project Foundry, which is described as not a new Halo game game or even a tech demo, but rather an Unreal Engine 5-based project that was made with the "same rigor, process, and fidelity as a shipped game would be" according to the article.
Ultimately, Project Foundry has three different environments. One has a familiar Halo setting with lots of trees that sees Master Chief go up against two Covenant Elites. The second has a winter-like location, and the final setting, Blightlands, is one that has been ravaged by the Flood aliens.
While the article makes it clear that the next game from Halo Studios is still a long way from being released, it also adds that the studio is now working on multiple games at once. The studio"s head Pierre Hintze stated that switching to Unreal Engine 5 "allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible.”