The future of Halo is starting to come into focus. During Sunday's Halo World Championships, 343 Industries made a number of announcements, including that it will officially be changing its name to Halo Studios and that it's working on multiple new games. In addition, the newly-rebranded studio say that all future projects will be developed on Unreal Engine, leaving behind the Slipspace Engine utilized by Halo Infinite.
The announcements were unveiled in a seven-minute video shown ahead of the Halo World Championship's grand finals, which showcased the results of Project Foundry — an experimental project designed to show a Halo game built using the Unreal Engine. While it's not much more than a tech demo, it offers a glimpse at a fresh beginning for Xbox's flagship franchise in the wake of 2021's Halo Infinite.
It's a huge shift for the Halo series, not the least because of the resources poured into the Slipspace Engine over the course of its development. The studio formerly known as 343 Industries notoriously struggled with the Slipspace engine during Halo Infinite's development, in part because it used tools dating back to the early 2000s. Still, it was expected to serve as the foundation for the series after Halo Infinite.
“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” art director Chris Matthews said in an interview with Xbox Wire. “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."
An early 2023 report suggested that Halo's developers were ready to hit the reset button on the series after a heavy shakeup within the studio, including transitioning to the Unreal Engine. The report also said that Halo's developers were focusing on pitching new Halo games while prototyping ideas. Project Foundry appears to be the culmination of that effort.
The newly-rebranded Halo Studios, for its part, is seeking to forge ahead under the leadership of Pierre Hintze and Elizabeth Van Wyck, with the studio now working on multiple new games. The three stepped into top roles at the studio in the wake of studio GM Bonnie Ross' departure in 2022, with series veteran Joseph Staten leaving Xbox in 2023. The new name and engine follows Xbox saying earlier this year that it's "full speed ahead" on a next-generation successor to the Xbox Series X|S.
"We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite,” says Hintze. “[But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible.”
The projects will be "ready when they're ready," Halo Studios says. For now, stay tuned for lots more analysis on IGN as well as Podcast Unlocked.
Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
