Announced at this weekend's Halo World Championship Series 2024, the series steward unveiled its plan for Master Chief's bright future. The entire team is now switching to Unreal Engine 5 and ditching its proprietary Slipspace tech. A research venture called Project Foundry is laying the groundwork for multiple Halo games. And, the studio's rebrand is more of a turning page for the series as a whole.
All Halo games from here on out will use UE5, Halo Studios confirmed, ditching its own proprietary Slipspace Engine it toiled on for years.
Halo moving to Unreal Engine 5 is being positioned as the first step of a transformation for Halo Studios to change its technology, structure, processes, and even culture. “We’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games,” says Pierre Hintze, studio head at Halo Studios.
In a YouTube video the new studio showed elements from the "Project Foundry" Unreal Engine research effort that has been ongoing for the past several years. While just a tech demo for now, it showed Master Chief and Covenant elite designs, along with three biomes including a Cascades-type location, Flood-impacted Blightlands and snowy Coldlands.
"Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” Halo Studios art director Chris Matthews told Xbox Wire. “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."
"Everything we've made is built to the kind of standards that we need to build for the future of our games," studio art director Chris Matthews says. "We were very intentional about not stepping into tech demo territory. We built things that we truly believe in, and the content that we've built – or at least a good percentage of it – could travel anywhere inside our games in the future if we so desire it." Hintze goes one step further to say that everything we see in Foundry is "expected to be in projects we are building, or future projects."
The possibilities are showcased in three landscapes created as part of Project Foundry, a research project lead FX artist Daniel Henley calls "an effort to show ourselves how far we can push things using Unreal 5." He goes on to say, "The original Halo franchise was a graphics showcase, it was best-in-class. That's what Halo was when it first was released and that's what Halo needs to be again."
The company plans to hire new employees and have multiple teams working on several games at once using a centralized UE5 pipeline. Halo Studios didn't reveal any specific projects or timelines, with CEO Pierre Hintze simply saying that they'll be "ready when they're ready." The studio has been under the leadership of Hintze, GM Bryan Koski and COO Elizabeth Van Wyck since studio GM Bonnie Ross left in 2022.