Multiple Halo games in development as 343 Industries announces big changes

While it’s come a long way since we started collecting the Halo Infinite achievements in 2021, 343 Industries’ latest Xbox exclusive game had a rocky start. Between Infinite and the now-canceled Halo TV show, the franchise has been in a tough spot, but it looks like 343 Industries, now rebranded to Halo Studios, is making some important changes alongside revealing that multiple Halo games are in development using Unreal Engine 5.Halo Studios working on multiple Halo games using Unreal Engine 5Fans tuned into the 2024 Halo World Championship this past weekend were treated to a surprise from 343 Industries, where the developer announced “a new dawn” for the Halo franchise. Alongside confirming that multiple Halo games are in development, 343 announced it’s changing its internal processes to help grow the franchise faster than before and retiring the Slipspace engine, some components of which are nearly 25 years old, in favor of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5. To reflect this monumental shift, 343 Industries will now be called Halo Studios. “If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters. Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2 – 343 Industries,” studio head Pierre Hintze said in an Xbox Wire post. “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.”All future Halo games from Halo Studios will be built using Unreal Engine 5, as it allows the developer to have multiple teams working on various projects at the same time. Halo Studios art director Chris Matthews says that although the Slipspace engine has been developed “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.”The move to Unreal Engine 5 should give the team the resources it needs to not only launch games faster, but also roll out updates quicker and have new team members creating in-game assets faster because they don’t need to be trained on the Slipspace Engine. “We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite,” Hintze said. “[But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible.”Looking ahead, Halo Studios has multiple games in development, none of which are “imminent,” but the studio will continue to support Halo Infinite with new Operations and Forge mode updates. You can get a glimpse at what future games could look like in the video above, which Halo Studios says isn’t a tech demo, as it created those assets so they could be used in future games if the team “desire it.” It could be some time until we learn anything about the upcoming Halo games, so in the meantime, why not check out some of the other games that sit on our list of the best Game Pass games alongside Halo?



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