343 Industries has announced they’re rebranding to Halo Studios, news confirmed alongside the reveal new Halo games are being made in Unreal Engine 5.
Details on the new Halo games are scant though multiple new projects are being made now in Unreal Engine 5. The previously released Halo Infinite will continue to be run on the studio’s proprietary Slipspace Engine, and will keep getting updates and content.
To help showcase what a future Halo game built in Unreal Engine 5 will look and feel like, the team made “Project Foundry,” which they teased as neither a game or a tech demo. Rather, the new entity is the exploration of what is possible with a Halo game made in Unreal Engine 5.
Here’s comments from key staff on the changes and the future of Halo, plus a new video:
Studio Head Pierre Hintze
“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.”
“We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed – the expectations of how fast their content is available. On Halo Infinite, we were developing a tech stack that was supposed to set us up for the future, and games at the same time.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite. [But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible.”
COO Elizabeth van Wyck
“The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future. 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. 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?”
“When we decided to do Foundry, it wasn’t, at that point, in our plan. But we needed to pause and – ‘validate’ is not the right word, but educate and understand what our capability is, and assess it, so we actually know we’re on the right path.
“We’ve intentionally been really quiet up to this point, but I think [today] is about just sharing where we are, what our priorities are as a studio, and where the team is. We’re really proud of what came out of Foundry.”
Studio Art Director, Chris Matthews
“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.”
“Where this type of work’s been done historically, across the industry, it can contain a lot of smoke and mirrors. 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.”
