The big news from Xbox is Halo: new name, new graphics engine, a bunch of games in development…

Xbox wants to make it clear that things are changing, and to do so, they have decided to remodel their major IP from the ground up, their most famous shooting saga along with Gears of War. Giving such a major reboot to a saga like Halo is no small feat.

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And the moment to announce this big change was during the final of the 2024 Halo World Championship. Through a video that we have a little further down we saw how 343 Industries showed us something completely new.

As they say on Xbox Wire, we are entering a new dawn for Halo. The new visual effects were created with the Unreal Engine 5, and we learned that all future Halo projects will use this engine, and that several new games are being developed with it.

Along with the engine change, the studio is experiencing changes in culture, workflow, and team organization. To adapt to this new approach, the franchise managers at 343 Industries are changing their name: Halo Studios is here.

The director of the studio, Pierre Hintze, describes it less as a break and more as turning a page to read the next chapter of the saga:

“If we break down Halo, we’ve had two very distinct chapters. Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2: 343 Industries. Now, I believe we have an audience eager for more. So not only are we going to try to improve development efficiency, but also change the recipe for how we make Halo games. So today we start a new chapter.”

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Goodbye to a unique game engine, but for a reason

The switch from the studio’s proprietary Slipspace Engine to Unreal is a key part of that change. Previously, 343 Industries needed a large portion of its staff just to develop and maintain the engine that powered their games.

“We believe that players’ consumption habits have changed: the expectations regarding how quickly their content is available,” says Hintze. “In Halo Infinite, we were developing a technology stack that should prepare us for the future, and games at the same time.”

As games evolve, and players increasingly point out the time it takes to see new games from their favorite series, they explain that the Halo Studios team felt the need to react.

“The way we used to make Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games in the future. So part of the conversation we had was about how to help the team focus on creating games, rather than on creating the tools and engines,” he says.

In addition to the broader changes in the organization of the studio, the adoption of Unreal means that Halo Studios is more capable of creating games with an approach that can satisfy fans, even creating multiple teams to develop different games simultaneously. But Unreal also has built-in advantages that would have taken years of work to replicate with Slipspace.

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There is another intrinsic advantage: Unreal is familiar to a large part of the video game industry. While developers would have to spend time learning to use Slipspace when joining 343, the adoption of the industry-leading engine by Halo Studios greatly eases the onboarding process for new talent.

With the switch to Unreal, the learning curve is shorter, the experience is there, and the series can grow much faster and more organically than before. The future of Halo involves a complete paradigm shift while remaining Xbox’s flagship series: the coming years should be bright for Xbox and Halo.