Following the bombshell announcement during the Halo World Championship today, 343 Industries are no more. Now it is Halo Studiosand Halo is moving on to Unreal Engine 5. And thanks to a new blog post from Xbox Wire, we’ve got a lot more detail on the why.
New Name!
343 Industries has been around ever since Bungie passed the torch over following the release of Halo Reach. As per Halo Studios Head, Pierre Hintze, “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.”
New Engine!
The venerable sci-fi universe has never looked so good, and as per the folks at the newly monikered ‘Halo Studios‘, that’s all thanks to Unreal Engine. Moving away from Slipspace was key – per Hintze, “On Halo Infinite, we were developing a tech stack that was supposed to set us up for the future, and games at the same time.”
Now it seems the team can focus on creating.
New Halo Game(s)!
Not only is the legendary franchise getting a freshly branded Studio and a new engine to play with, it’s getting multiple projects to boot, with multiple games confirmed to be in development, rather than the team focusing on a single project.
Per Studio Head, Patrick Hintze,”We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite, switching to Unreal allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible.”
We’d suggest going to give the full blog post a read, and you can catch the full live stream from HCS (including the Twitch chat going wild, right here) or you can watch the crowd react, as our very own Soulblazerz was there on the show floor.
