Reports have claimed for close to couple of years at this point that 343 Industries is ready to ditch its proprietary Slipspace Engine and instead move to Unreal Engine 5 instead, and that’s now been officially confirmed. Not only has the studios rebranded itself as Halo Studios, it has been announced that all future Halo titles are going to be built on Unreal Engine 5.
As explained by Elizabeth van Wyck, COO at Halo Studios, continuing to work with Slipspace wouldn’t allow the studio to work in the manner that it wishes to going forward. “The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future,” she said. “So part of the conversation we had was about how we help the team focus on making games, versus making the tools and the engines.”
“It’s not just about how long it takes to bring a game to market, but how long it takes for us to update the game, bring new content to players, adapt to what we’re seeing our players want,” she added. “Part of that is [in how we build the game], but another part is the recruiting. How long does it take to ramp somebody up to be able to actually create assets that show up in your game?” (Note: Halo Studios – then known as 343 Industries – was one of several Xbox studios to be affected by mass layoffs in January 2023 that saw over 10,000 job cuts across all of Microsoft.)
Halo Studios’ art director Chris Matthews added, “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.
“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. 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.”
Interestingly, Halo Studios’ shift to Unreal doesn’t come out of the blue. The studio has spent the last couple of years on Project Foundry, which is an expansive tech demo built on Unreal Engine 5 that it describes as “a true reflection of what would be required for a new Halo game using Unreal, and a training tool for how to get there”. Apparently, the tech demo has been “made with the same rigor, process, and fidelity as a shipped game would be.”
Project Foundry entails three entire biomes built by Halo Studios. One is inspired by the Pacific Northwest, the other is dubbed Coldlands and is described as “a region locked in a deep freeze”, while the third, the Blightlands, is “a world consumed by the parasitic Flood”. You can see screenshots of Project Foundry below.
Interestingly enough, Halo Studios says the work done on Project Foundry may very well wind up in future games.
“Where this type of work’s been done historically, across the industry, it can contain a lot of smoke and mirrors,” said art director Chris Matthews. “
It sometimes leads players down paths where they believe it’s going to be one thing, and then something else happens. The ethos of Foundry is vigorously the opposite of that.
“Everything we’ve made is built to the kind of standards that we need to build for the future of our games. We were very intentional about not stepping into tech demo territory. We built things that we truly believe in, and the content that we’ve built – or at least a good percentage of it – could travel anywhere inside our games in the future if we so desire it.”
Studio president Pierre Hintze added, “It’s fair to say that our intent is that the majority of what we showcased in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects.”
Speaking of which, Halo Studios has confirmed that it is currently working on multiple new Halo games.