It’s an obvious move: Microsoft is renaming its development studio 343 Industries to “Hello Studios.” The team, which has been working on a “Halo” game for over a decade, should continue to do so. Microsoft announced at an e-sports event about “Halo Infinite” that several new titles are in the works.
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Future “Halo” games will no longer be created in the in-house Slipspace engine, but will instead be developed with Unreal Engine 5. Epic’s Unreal Engine is the most used game engine in the world. More and more studios are developing their titles in it – for example, the “cyberpunk” studio CD Projekt has announced that the new part of “The Witcher” is being developed in the Unreal Engine.
One advantage of the Switch is the ability to focus exclusively on game development and not engine development in the future, says 343 manager Elizabeth Van Wyk in a video published with the announcement. “We’ve been a kind of tech company and studio.”
Project Foundry Tech Demo
The video is also worth watching because of the tech demo of sorts: “Project Foundry” is a “research project” rendered in Unreal Engine 5, as art director Chris Matthews calls it. It provides a glimpse of what a “Halo” game developed in Unreal Engine 5 might look like in the future – without compromising the hardware restrictions that the final video game will have to take into account, especially for consoles.
“With all due respect, some of the components of Slipspace are about 25 years old,” Art director Chris Matthews says in a blog post“One of our main concerns is to grow and expand our world so players can interact and experience more. Nanite and Lumen allow us to do that in a way the industry hasn’t seen before.”
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Meanwhile, the new Halo studio is also expected to grow. Van Wyk says more staff have been hired for future “Halo” games that have not yet been announced. This is especially surprising considering that Microsoft has cut jobs at several other studios in recent months. In January, 1,900 people were laid off, representing about 8 percent of Xbox’s workforce. This particularly affected Bethesda’s recently acquired teams. Alpha Dog and Arkane Austin Studios were completely closed.
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