The future of Halo has been revealed. Prior to the 2024 Halo World Championship today, Halo Studios, formerly 343 Industries released a video providing a glimpse at the future of the series which will be moving to Unreal Engine 5. Over on Xbox Wire, Xbox said “We’re entering a new dawn for Halo, Those new visuals were created using Unreal Engine 5 – and we learned that all future Halo projects will use the engine, and that multiple new games using it are in development. Alongside the engine change, the studio is seeing changes in culture, workflow, and how its teams are organized. To match that new approach, franchise stewards 343 Industries are changing their name – Halo Studios is here.”
“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters,” Studio Head Pierre Hintze said. “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 new chapter starts with Halo Studios making the shift to Unreal Engine 5. The change happened for a variety of reasons but one of the main reasons was to focus on making the games instead of making the tools and the engines that they had to do with the studio’s proprietary Slipspace Engine.
“The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future,” COO Elizabeth van Wyck 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.”
With the move to Unreal Engine 5, and the wider changes to how the studio is set up, Halo Studios will be more able to create games with a focus that can satisfy fans – even setting up multiple teams to create different games simultaneously. Unreal Engine allows the developers to utilize some of the in-built benefits that it comes with that would have taken years of work to try and replicate with Slipspace such as Nanite and Lumen.
““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,” Studio Art Director Chis Matthews explains. “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.”
The other benefit that switching to Unreal Engine 5 provides is how familiar it is to huge parts of the wider gaming industry so new members of the team will more time on making the game instead of learning how to use Slipspace.
“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,” says Van Wyck. “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?”
The switch to Unreal Engine 5 lead to a research project called Project Foundry which is the source for all the new footage that is shown in the video. Halo Studios made it clear that this isn’t a new game – nor is it a traditional tech demo, it’s a true reflection of what would be required for a new Halo game using Unreal, and a training tool for how to get there. Foundry has been made with the same rigor, process, and fidelity as a shipped game would be.
“Where this type of work’s been done historically, across the industry, it can contain a lot of smoke and mirrors,” explains 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.”
Hintze goes further: “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.”
The team at Halo Studios created three distinct biomes in the style of Halo. The goal was to create something old, something new, and something truly alien.
Something old took the form of a biome inspired by the Pacific Northwest. a staple of the series – but in dramatic new form. Waterfalls crash over mountains, a running creek becomes the site of a tableau pitching the Chief against two Covenant Elites, and the team pushed Unreal to include as much foliage as technically possible.
Something new materialized in the Coldlands location, a region region locked in a deep freeze, with snowdrifts covering plateaus, and ice reflecting what’s above and refracting what’s below.
The Blightlands represents something alien, a brand new take on a Halo location where the world is consumed by the parasitic Flood. The express purpose of the Blightlands was to see how this new-look Halo team could push the world itself farther than previous Halo games.
The team also focused on making giving the characters of Halo a new look and feel. The Chief’s armor has been modelled with extreme care, down to individual panels on his combat gloves. An Elite’s energy sword now feels less like a solid object and more reflective of the name – a crackling swoosh of dangerous energy.
The aim wasn’t just to push the studio, but the engine itself – Foundry is designed to do things that we haven’t seen in games using Unreal across the industry, Halo began its life as a graphical showcase for the original Xbox – the goal is to make that so again.
“Halo is such an incredible franchise and it’s awesome to see Halo Studios already pushing the boundaries of Unreal Engine 5,” said Bill Clifford, Vice President and General Manager of Unreal Engine at Epic Games. “We’re honored to support the Halo team in realizing their creative visions through Unreal Engine. Project Foundry’s work demonstrates how they can bring Halo to life with beautifully detailed, uncompromised worlds.”
“I think it’s pretty well known that [switching engine] has been a topic that the studio has thought about for a long, long time,” says Van Wyck. “[The release of] Unreal Engine 5 was when we felt like we could make Halo games that respect and reflect the true soul of Halo while also being able to build games that can deliver on the scale and ambition of content that players want.”
“The spirit of Halo is more than just the visuals,” agrees Matthews. “It’s the lore. It’s the physics. Playing as the Chief, you’re this huge tank of a soldier – it’s the way that he moves, he feels. We’re all really obsessed about what our players love about Halo. We’re constantly listening to this feedback – and that’s at the core of any initiative like Foundry, or any intention that the studio has about how we move forwards.”
“We’re thinking about the intangibles,” Hintze adds. “The interaction with the Master Chief, or your Spartan, or the enemies. We are very careful about the decisions we’re making in that space – down to the precision and authenticity of the weapons, the authenticity of the animations. There are a list of nuances which we use to verify that we’re on track.”
Talking about what’s next, Halo Studios notes that this is the beginning of a new chapter, not the final stages. It’ll be a minute before a new Halo game is released. In the meantime, Halo Infinite will still be supported through the Slipspace Engine. More Operations are coming, including updates to the Forge mode. In esports, Year 4 of the Halo Championship Series, using Halo Infinite, has just been announced. But in the background, the next steps for Halo will be taken.
Hintze noted that the priority right now is on doing the work, not simply talking about it:
“One of the things I really wanted to get away from was the continued teasing out of possibilities and ‘must-haves’. We should do more and say less. For me, I really think it is important that we continue the posture which we have right now when it comes to our franchise – the level of humility, the level of servitude towards Halo fans.
“We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, at scale. Today, it’s the first step – we’re showing Foundry because it feels right to do so – we want to explain our plans to Halo fans, and attract new, passionate developers to our team. The next step will be talking about the games themselves.”
Multiple Halo games are in development. While past titles had the entire studio focused on a single, evolving project, Halo Studios has recalibrated:
“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.”