Ever since mass layoffs at Halo maker 343 Industries, fans have wondered what the future will hold for the famed sci-fi shooter. It turns out Microsoft still has big plans for Master Chief, and they involve multiple upcoming projects as well as the franchise making the jump to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, the tech that powers Fortnite and a host of other Xbox first-party games.
343 Industries revealed the news during the 2024 Halo World Championship, including that the studio will be called Halo Studios going forward. Instead of continuing to use its current Slipspace Engine, which was created from the ground up for Halo Infinite, the franchise will abandon it for Unreal Engine 5. An effort called “Project Foundry” is also currently underway to build a foundation for training and best practices for developing Halo with the new tech.
A mini-video documentary featuring studio head Pierre Hintze, COO Elizabeth van Wyck, and studio art director Chris Matthews laid out the company’s vision for the future of Halo. It revealed that multiple new Halo games are currently in development, and Halo Studios is changing more than just its name, with shifts to studio culture, workflow, and team organization as well. One hope for making the jump to UE 5 is that recruitment will become easier and development more streamlined when people don’t have to learn from, and adapt to, an entirely foreign proprietary engine on the fly.
While Hintze called this a new chapter for Halo, it’s hard not to see it as a clean break from and rebuke of the recent past. Halo Infinite went through a notoriously challenging development cycle, including missing the launch window for Xbox Series X/S, and came out the other side of that good but not great. Less than two years after it released, then-343 Industries suffered a reported 95 layoffs amidst wider-scale cuts at Microsoft.
Moving to Unreal Engine might not fix some of the deeper issues at play in that messy production process, but it does suggest Microsoft is pushing toward a much bigger focus on internal co-development resources. The Coalition, which is making Gears of War: E-Day, has always used Unreal Engine. A bunch of other Xbox game studios have also already made the jump, including Obsidian (Avowed and Outer Worlds 2), InXile Entertainment (Clockwork Revolutions), The Initiative (Perfect Dark), and Compulsion Games (South of Midnight).
Undead Labs’ State of Decay 3 is also using UE5, which is seemingly at least part of why Obsidian Entertainment has been able to help out with the tech for its open world. That’s just some of the co-development potential Microsoft teased earlier this year as part of its big summer showcase. Most of the fruits of this effort have yet to be seen in action, though. Avowed was previously set to arrive this fall but was pushed to February 2025. There are also still notable studios inside Microsoft that aren’t using Unreal, including Playground Games which is making Fable and almost all of the teams from the Bethesda acquisition.
As for Halo, we still don’t know when these new games will be revealed or what they are. Tom Warren at The Verge reported not too long ago that a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is in the works. For the studio to transition the franchise to new tech, it would certainly make sense to begin with a beloved, known entity like the first game and learn from there. Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer, meanwhile, continues to get new updates, though with these new changes in place it no longer sounds like the platform for the future of Halo that it was once described as.