By The “Halo” gaming franchise, which scored a lackluster response with the launch of “Halo: Infinite”, got a new shot of life today thanks to several key announcements during the Halo World Championships.
First up, developer 343 Industries will officially change its name to Halo Studios and confirmed that they are working on multiple new games in the franchise.
The key thing about all these future projects will be that they are all being developed in Unreal Engine 5, leaving behind the Slipspace Engine previously used by “Halo Infinite” which itself was a reworking of the Blam Engine which has been in place since the 2001 original.
The announcements were unveiled in a seven-minute video that showcased the results of three environments for the games built using the Unreal Engine – a Pacific Northwest-style mountainous landscape, fields of ice, and a vista consumed by The Flood.
It fits in with reports early last year that Halo’s developers are essentially resetting the series with one big change being the transition to the Unreal Engine.
According to Xbox Wire there will also be “changes in culture, workflow, and how its teams are organized”. The switch to Unreal takes a lot of the focus off making the tools and the engines for the game to just straight making the games themselves. Studio Head Pierre Hintze says:
“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.”
The projects will be “ready when they’re ready” he says, but the new approach should allow for faster output of games and let multiple teams create different games simultaneously. At the same time, the goal is to make games that are once again a real “graphical showcase”.
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