343 Industries, developer of the Halo series, has confirmed that it is working on several new games for the franchise under a new name: Halo Studios.
In a surprise announcement last night, the newly rebranded Halo Studios unveiled a first look at Project Foundry: its experimental look at what Xbox's flagship franchise developed in Unreal Engine 5 will look like.
All Halo games from now on will use UE5, Halo Studios confirmed, abandoning its own proprietary Slipspace Engine that it worked on for years.
Project Foundry is not a new game per se, but rather a demonstration of advanced technology. Still, in a six-minute video and accompanying Xbox Wire blog post, it's made clear that the quality shown is supposed to be fully representative of what a Halo game running Unreal Engine 5 might look like, and of course In fact, parts of Project Foundry could be seen. appear in future projects.
“It's fair to say that our intention is for the majority of what we show at Foundry to be in projects we're building or in future projects,” said Halo Studios boss Pierre Hintze.
Project Foundry includes a slice of Halo's classic Pacific Northwest setting, packed with trees and details, and our first look at Master Chief himself battling a pair of Covenant Elites. Other areas that have been modeled include the Coldlands, a new, frozen location, and the Blightlands, a sticky, ominous environment that has been taken over by Halo's Flood.
“The first Halo redefined console gaming in 2001, and across generations, Halo has pushed the state of the art with incredible gameplay, story and music,” said Tim Sweeney, head of Epic Games, maker of the Unreal Engine. “Epic is honored that the Halo Studios team has chosen our tools to assist them in their future work!”
Halo Studios' complete switch to Unreal Engine is not unexpected. In early February 2023, it was reported that the then-343 Industries was abandoning Slipspace for Epic's ubiquitous gaming tools, following Halo Infinite's failure to meet expectations, staff layoffs, and similar changes by CD Projekt Red to the next Witcher game, and Crystal Dynamics for Tomb Raider.
Getting rid of the studio's Slipspace Engine means adopting an industry-wide standard, which should speed up hiring and onboarding (and Halo Studios' announcement now is, at least in part, to encourage recruiting). But it is also the company that is turning the page on the development of Halo Infinite, which is generally considered to have failed to meet Microsoft's expectations.
“Respectfully, some of Slipspace's components are almost 25 years old,” said the studio's art director, Chris Matthews.
“We're disproportionately focused on trying to create the conditions to be successful in maintaining Halo Infinite,” Hintze said. “[But switching to Unreal] “It allows us to put all our focus on making multiple new experiences with the highest quality possible.”
So when will these new Halo games materialize? It seems not yet.
“We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, at scale,” Hintze said. “Today is 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 to talk about the games themselves.”