343 Industries becomes Halo Studios, multiple Halo games in development on Unreal Engine 5

Xbox Game Studios subsidiary 343 Industries is changing its name to Halo Studios, and all future Halo projects will be built in Unreal Engine 5, including multiple new Halo games currently in development, the studio announced.

“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.”

Halo games previously ran on Halo Studios’ proprietary Slipspace Engine, which required a large portion of staff to upkeep.

“We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed—the expectations of how fast their content is available,” said Hintze. “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.”

Halo Studios chief operating officer Elizabeth van Wyck added, “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.”

Adopting Unreal Engine 5 also means Halo Studios can create games with a focus that can satisfy fans, even setting up multiple games to create different games simultaneously.

Studio art director Chris Matthews explained, “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.”