343 Industries has announced that it is officially changing its name to Halo Studios and that all future Halo games will be developed on the Unreal Engine 5. This includes several games currently in development. Additionally, the developer released a demonstration and training tool called “Project Foundry”. The developer claims the series’ previous engine, Slipspace Engine, required a lot of maintenance and staff to keep up. A trailer showing Project Foundry was also released.
Halo Studios head Pierre Hintze commented on the announcement in a statement saying:
“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters,” said Halo Studios head Pierre Hintze in a statement. “Chapter 1: Bungie. Chapter 2: 343 Industries. Now, I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. So we’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games. So, we start a new chapter today.”
Studio 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.”
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