It’s always nice to see something new and sparkly, and for Halo fans, that feeling arrived as 343 Industries, the developers of the series, has announced that it is now rebranding to Halo Studios with several new games in the pipeline using the power of Unreal Engine 5.
Giving fans a first look via Project Foundry, which reimagines how the flagship shooter would look like in Unreal Engine 5, it is clear that visually, things would be taking a step up compared to the games that have been utilising the studio’s proprietary Slipspace Engine.
“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. 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,” shared studio head Pierre Hintze.
The six-minute-long tech demo may not be an actual game, but it is as close as we can get to an actual Halo game running on Unreal Engine 5, something that the team is eager to embrace.
“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” explains studio art director, Chris Matthews. :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 [Unreal’s rendering and lighting technologies] 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.”
That work will materialise in new Halo games in the future, although Halo Studios is not yet committing to showing anything just yet beyond the Foundry demo. Fingers crossed then.
