Microsoft’s 343 Industries rebrands as Halo Studios, adopts Unreal Engine

Microsoft’s 343 Industries has rebranded as Halo Studios and it has adopted Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

Halo Studios made the announcement in a video today. It’s a big endorsement for Unreal Engine 5, which has been hailed for its realistic graphics and physics.

And it’s the latest sign that Microsoft is still investing heavily in Halo, which has sold more than 81 million copies to date and generated an estimated $10 billion-plus in revenue.

The last installment of Halo was Halo: Infinite, which debuted in December 2021. It received good reviews and sold well, but there were complaints about the quality and the length of time it took for 343 Industries to produce the title. Bonnie Ross, the head of the Halo franchise at 343 Industries, resigned from Microsoft in September 2022.

Microsoft has been quiet about what is coming next until now. The step to move from the proprietary Halo game engine to Unreal Engine 5 is a big decision to purchase technology from the outside that will be the foundational tool for making the game. And it’s an admission that Epic’s industry-wide tool Unreal is likely going to lead to better quality and more realistic imagery than what Microsoft itself could have economically built with its own game engine, dubbed Slipspace.

In a blog post, studio head Pierre Hintze said that this is a new turning of the page for Halo.

“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters. Chapter 1 – Bungie,” Hintze said. “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.”

In the video, Microsoft also introduced a number of the leaders of the new Halo Studios, including John Junyszek, senior community manager; Melissa Boone, chief of staff; Elizabeth Van Wyck, chief operating officer; Casey Wu, executive producer; Andrea Gaussmann, lead technical artist; Chris Matthews, studio art director; and Max Szlagor, studio design director.

It started out as Project Foundry, started by studio art director Chris Matthews, who wanted to see how far the team could push things forward using Unreal Engine 5. It was a research project at first and it was a way to prepare for the next step of making new Halo games. He noted that the first Halo was a graphics showcase that was best in class, and that is what Halo needs to be again.

They went to work on creating biomes like taking inspiration from the Pacific Northwest and its greenery and waterfalls as the terrain of the next Halo. A second biome focused on the Cold Lands, which was rich in texture in a winter wasteland. And there was something called The Blight Lands, taken over by The Flood.

Lenny Simon, director of UE licensing for Epic Games, also spoke in the video as part of praise for Microsoft’s move into the next generation.

“What made Halo successful at the beginning? What is the legacy of Halo, and what’s the soul that we want to bring forward and what’s the craft of making Halo games and how do we set our studio at best to go deliver on that?,” said Van Wyck, in the video.

In the blog post, she said, “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.”

She said the team was split in two in the past, working on the technology while also trying to make the game.

“We knew we had to make a change in order to take us into the future,” Wu said in the video.

“Since we’ve made the change to shift to UE, we can bring Halo forward in ways that people have never seen before while still being true to what Halo is,” Van Wyck said.

“Fortunately we have a studio that’s really passionate about Halo about the look and the feel and you know I think there’s a lot of hunger to really collaborate to move forward together,” said Szlagor.

There are multiple titles in the works, and now Halo Studios is hiring new people for it. There’s clearly making multiple worlds and “changing the recipe.” Hiring new people also makes for a good argument to standardize on Unreal, as more of the new hires will know that platform.