Several major changes are coming to the Halo franchise, and the newly renamed Halo Studios has just explained why it is switching over to Unreal Engine 5 for future projects. Earlier this week, the former 343 Industries announced a massive rebranding and overhaul of its internal culture, workflow, and internal organization during the Halo World Championship tournament. In addition to the new name of Halo Studios, it was confirmed that multiple Halo projects are in development, and they will be built using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5.

This marks a striking departure from Halo Infinite, which was developed using 343 Industries' proprietary Slipspace Engine. Halo Infinite itself suffered from a lengthy and troubled development cycle that saw it delayed multiple times before finally launching in the winter of 2021. When it finally hit PC and Xbox Series X/S, Halo Infinite garnered a mixed reaction, being praised for its open-world single-player content while generating controversy over online multiplayer issues, beloved features like Forge Mode being missing at launch, and live-service microtransaction elements that many accused of putting profits above delivering a worthwhile gaming experience.

Now change is on the horizon, and several Halo Studios developers have provided explanations for Halo’s recently announced move to Unreal Engine 5. In an interview with Xbox Wire, COO Elizabeth van Wyck stated that the way that Halo Studios has made Halo games in the past “doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future,” and that part of its new approach is centering its focus on making the games themselves rather than maintaining proprietary tools and engines.

Slipspace Engine is one such tool, but Halo Studios personnel like Studio Art Director Chris Matthews found that using it to create Halo Infinite slowed the process down considerably. “Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” Matthews notes, saying that there are elements to Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 that were unavailable in 343’s in-house engine that would have taken up too much time and resources to try and replicate, such as Unreal’s Nanite and Lumen technologies (used for rendering and lighting, respectively).

Unreal Engine’s ever-growing popularity within the larger gaming industry was another deciding factor in Halo Studios using the new Unreal Engine 5 for its future Halo games. As van Wyck says, a lot of new team members are already familiar with Unreal, meaning that workers can jump straight into the project at hand rather than spend time learning how to use a new engine. The renamed Halo Studios hopes that this will lead to much smoother development cycles for new Halo projects, but only time will tell how these changes will impact future games.

Posted: Oct 11, 2024 6:41 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://gamerant.com/halo-unreal-engine-5-move-developer-explanation/