The Future of Halo Is Being Built With Unreal Engine 5

Along with 343 Industries now becoming Halo Studios, future Halo games will be developed using Unreal Engine 5. The Verge's Tom Warren reports: 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. The team building Halo will move from the studio's Slipspace Engine to Unreal, after the proprietary engine it built for Halo Infinite became difficult to use and strained development. Halo Studios has had to dedicate a lot of staff to developing the Slipspace Engine, and parts of it are almost 25 years old.

"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," says Chris Matthews, art director at Halo Studios. "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." Halo Studios isn't committing to any release dates or new Halo game announcements just yet, but the team has been building some examples of Halo running in Unreal. Dubbed Project Foundry, the work is "neither a game nor a tech demo," but more of a research, development, and training tool. It's also the foundation for how the studio is changing up the way it builds Halo games.

Project Foundry has been built as if it was a shipping game so that a bunch of it can appear in Halo games in the future. "It's fair to say that our intent is that the majority of what we showcased in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects," says Hintze. Project Foundry includes more detailed landscapes for Halo biomes, as well as foliage levels we haven't seen in Halo games in the past. Master Chief's armor has even been remodeled in this footage [...]. Halo Studios is now working on multiple Halo games, while the Slipstream Engine will continue to power Halo Infinite. "We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite," says Hintze. "[But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible."

Maybe they could try making it fun again

[locater16]

Like how 22 years ago I was able to play Halo with my brother at the same time on Christmas morning, but 20+ years of tech innovation has somehow lost the ability to do that.

Re: Maybe they could try making it fun again

[viperidaenz]

Now you get to buy two consoles, two copies of the game, and two subscriptions to Xbox live!

They are looking for cheaper hires

[ffkom]

Reading between the lines of marketing speak, the citation in the screenrant article [screenrant.com] tells about the true nature of this change: "... more easily allow Halo Studios to hire additional developers". Meaning: Cheaper developers, who do not need to be capable of maintaining a render engine. But at some point, with so many game studios outsourcing what was once game developer core competency, they will find out that Epic can raise their prices whenever they like.

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[sodul]

I don't write video games, or at least not anymore, so my understanding of the Unreal Engine is limited.
What I've gathered is that the engine and the tooling around is are now advanced enough that a hobby level developer can create a game by mostly clicking around to generate the general aspect of the game and that there is little advanced coding required. It is not as dumbed down as Scratch, which my 9y old son is using to create basic games, but it seems that a lot of game development is heading in this d

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[tlhIngan]

I don't write video games, or at least not anymore, so my understanding of the Unreal Engine is limited.
What I've gathered is that the engine and the tooling around is are now advanced enough that a hobby level developer can create a game by mostly clicking around to generate the general aspect of the game and that there is little advanced coding required. It is not as dumbed down as Scratch, which my 9y old son is using to create basic games, but it seems that a lot of game development is heading in this d

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[znrt]

advanced enough that a hobby level developer can create a game by mostly clicking around to generate the general aspect of the game and that there is little advanced coding required

if by "advanced coding" you mean low level gpu stuff or complex rendering algorithms, yes, game engines provide all that functionality via an api that can indeed be used via a graphical metaphor (called "blueprints" in unreal). however those apis tend to be huge and convoluted (unreal's specially so) and take a while to know and master, so it's a little more involved than just "clicking around", you do need a clear sense of what you are doing and why, and that must be learned. actually writing the code or w

How old are parts on Unreal Engine 5?

[mvfranz]

>Halo Studios has had to dedicate a lot of staff to developing the Slipspace Engine, and parts of it are almost 25 years old.
I don't know anything about Unreal Engine 5, but unless it was rewritten from scratch since the first release of Unreal Engine, wouldn't parts of it also be 25 years old?

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[darkain]

From my understanding, this is EXACTLY what Epic did actually. UE3 was hindered by proprietary licenses with different modules inside of it contributed back from 3rd party companies developing games and expanding on the engine capabilities.

UE4 was a complete re-write to get away from all the licensing BS, and simplify the licensing and contributing process.

UE5 is then a continuation on UE4 with major enhancements.