"Halo": Several new games are being created in Unreal Engine 5
Several new "Halo" games are in the works – all in the Unreal Engine 5. The development studio 343 Industries is also being renamed.
Screenshot from the tech demo "Project Foundry"
(Image: Microsoft)
It is a clear task: Microsoft is renaming its development studio 343 Industries "Halo Studios". The team, which has been working on "Halo" games for over a decade, is to continue doing just that. Several new titles are in the works, Microsoft announced at an e-sports event for "Halo Infinite".
Future "Halo" games will therefore no longer be created using the in-house Slipspace Engine, but will instead be developed using Unreal Engine 5. Epic's Unreal Engine is the most widely used game engine in the world. More and more studios are developing their titles in it – . For example, "Cyberpunk" studio CD Projekt has announced that the new part of "The Witcher" will be developed in the Unreal Engine.
One advantage of the switch is the ability to focus exclusively on game development rather than engine development in future, says 343 manager Elizabeth Van Wyck in a video published to accompany the announcement. "We used to be a kind of tech company and studio in one."
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Tech demo Project Foundry
The video is also worth watching because of a kind of tech demo: "Project Foundry" is a "research project" rendered in Unreal Engine 5, as Art Director Chris Matthews calls it. It provides a glimpse of what a "Halo" game developed in Unreal Engine 5 could look like in the future – without compromising the hardware restrictions that finished video games have to adhere to, especially for consoles.
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"With all due respect, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old," says art director Chris Matthews in a blog post. "One of our main goals is to grow and expand our world so that players can interact and experience more. Nanite and Lumen allow us to do that in a way the industry hasn't seen before."
Meanwhile, the new Halo Studio is set to grow. More employees have been hired for future "Halo" games, which have not yet been announced, says Van Wyck. This is particularly surprising because Microsoft has cut jobs at many other studios in recent months. In January, 1900 people were made redundant, which corresponds to around 8 percent of the Xbox workforce. The recently acquired Bethesda teams were hit particularly hard. The Alpha Dog and Arkane Austin studios were closed completely.
(dahe)
