343 Industries is now Halo Studios – Announces switch to Unreal Engine 5

Halo developer 343 Industries has rebranded as Halo Studios and announced that they have multiple Unreal Engine-based games in development.

The first Unreal project that they’ve discussed is the purely internal ‘Project Foundry’, a research project that looks to explore all the possibilities and potential that Unreal Engine can give to future Halo games. The fruits of this effort are seen in the video with a variety of different worlds and landscapes, from a traditional Halo-y environment to a fully Flood-infested world.

This will mark an end of the long lineage of Halo game engines that go all the way back to the original game on Xbox, though it’s never been the easiest engine to work with. As Bungie passed the baton over to the newly formed 343 Industries, the new team revamped the game engine for the tail end of the Xbox 360 era and Halo 4. Halo 5 was meant to have a lot of work on the production pipeline, but 343 leadership admit that never really happened when hyping up the Slipspace engine for Halo Infinite.

Except that Slipspace might have reworked a lot of the game engine, but it didn’t necessarily become easier for 343 and its team of contractors to work with – company policy of keeping contractors on for only 18 months seeing a lot of brain drain through Infinite’s development and repeatedly training new staff. Switching to Unreal Engine 5 will certainly help on that front, though it’s still a massive shame to see yet another studio give up on in-house tech.

Through all this, the 343 brand took ding after ding, so it makes sense that they try to shake off that bad reputation with a new name. Fans will hope that they can quickly replicate the feel of Halo as well, not just the l

Microsoft’s game studios are no strangers to using Unreal Engine. The Coalition is renowned for their mastery of Unreal Engine for their Gears of War games – Gears of War E-Day their first full production with UE5 – always able to extract the very best out of it and the Xbox console hardware. You also have Ninja Theory doing incredible things for Hellblade II, Obsidian using Unreal for Avowed, and on, and on.

However, having had to wrap up development on Halo Infinite and then support it, adding co-op many months later, Halo Studios is a long way behind their compatriots. The Coalition, for example, shared this kind of tech demo back in 2021.

There’s a long road ahead, in other words, for the next full Halo game. Will 343… I mean Halo Studios do something smaller in the meantime?

Tags: 343 Industries, Halo Infinite, Halo Studios