LogIn343 Industries, now known as Halo Studios, has numerous UE5-powered games in the works.
During this year's Halo World Championship grand finals, 343 Industries made a surprise announcement that they're rebranding as Halo Studios and moving away from their proprietary Slipspace Engine in favor of Epic Games' Unreal Engine, which will be used for all future Halo games.
"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," Studio Head Pierre Hintze said in the announcement. "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."
According to the interview shared by Halo Studios alongside their announcement, the decision to switch from Slipspace to Unreal Engine is driven by the need to speed up their production pipeline and focus their workforce on game development rather than maintaining and enhancing their engine.
The freed-up engine developers will help ex-343 handle numerous projects simultaneously, a crucial need for the studio, as they currently have several Halo games in the works. The final reason for choosing UE5 is as trivial as trivial gets – it just has more to offer than Slipspace.
"Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old," notes Chris Matthews, Studio Art Director. "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 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."
Another benefit of switching to Unreal Engine is that far more developers outside of Halo Studios are familiar with it compared to Slipspace, making it much easier to hire experienced developers and integrate them into the development pipeline immediately, without having to teach them the ins and outs of the studio's proprietary software first.
"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," Halo Studio COO Elizabeth van Wyck adds. "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?"
So what do you think about the engine switch and ex-343's decision to work on several Halo projects at the same time? Tell us in the comments!
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