Goodbye 343 Industries, hello Halo Studios, multiple new games, and a switch to Unreal Engine 5
Big changes are coming for Master Chief.
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It's the end of an era at 343 Industries, as the developer is going by a new name, Halo Studios, with multiple Halo games apparently in development.
Just yesterday, in this story about how Halo Infinite is getting a third person mode, I noted how the future of the series is a bit uncertain given its lack of appearance at Not-E3, and then someone at Microsoft decides to pull a prank on me after I packed up my work desk for the day and share what the future of the series is. It was the 2024 Halo World Championship yesterday, and before that all kicked off the developer formerly known as 343 Industries had a video to share which had some pretty big announcements for both it and Halo.
Off the bat, you'll already have seen that 343 is now called Halo Studios, with studio head Pierre Hintze explaining in an Xbox Wire post, "If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters. 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."
The other big change is that Halo Studios will be switching away from its proprietary Slipspace Engine to Unreal Engine 5, something that was first reported to be happening almost exactly two years ago now. The video above talks about Project Foundry, a research project revolving around seeing what Halo looks like on Unreal Engine, which has apparently been worked on for the past two years. While no actual gameplay was shown off, a few different locales familiar to Halo fans have been rendered in Unreal Engine, to set some expectations for what a new game might look like.
Speaking of new games, there are apparently multiple of them in the works, with extra teams being set up to work on them - just don't expect to see any of them yet, as this whole announcement really is just a case of "don't worry, the future of Halo is safe." That obviously remains to be seen, but hey, it's something!