Before today's 2024 Halo World Championship final, we saw an unexpected video featuring landscapes you might expect from the Halo series: Forerunner architecture rising from dramatic Pacific Northwest-inspired environments, beautiful ice fields, and even a ruined view overtaken by The Flood. Of course, we caught glimpses of Master Chief and his iconic enemies, including a Banshee flying past the camera. However, what we saw wasn’t a look into the past; it was something entirely new.

We are entering a new dawn for Halo. Those new visuals were created with Unreal Engine 5, and we learned that all future Halo projects will use this engine, with several new games already in development utilizing it. Alongside this engine change, the studio is undergoing shifts in culture, workflow, and team organization. To align with this new approach, the franchise managers at 343 Industries have decided to rename the studio: Halo Studios.

Pierre Hintze, the studio head, defines this more as turning a new page rather than a radical change.

"If we look at Halo, we’ve had two very distinct chapters: the first with Bungie, and the second with 343 Industries. Now, I believe we have an audience that’s craving more. That’s why we’re not just aiming to improve development efficiency, but also to change the formula for how we make Halo games. So today, we begin a new chapter."

The first step

Switching from the studio’s proprietary Slipspace engine to Unreal is a key part of that change. Previously, 343 Industries needed a large portion of its staff just to develop and maintain the engine their games ran on. “We believe players’ consumption habits have changed, along with their expectations of how quickly content is made available,” says Hintze. “In Halo Infinite, we were developing a technology stack that was supposed to prepare us for the future while making the game at the same time.”

As games evolve and players increasingly point out the time it takes to see new games from their favorite series, the Halo Studios team felt the need to respond. As COO Elizabeth van Wyck puts it:

“The way we used to make Halo games doesn’t necessarily work as well for how we want to make games in the future. That’s why part of the conversation we had was about how we help the team focus on making games, rather than building the tools and engines.”

Along with the broader changes in how the studio is structured (which you can read more about below), adopting Unreal means that Halo Studios is now better equipped to create games with a focus on meeting fans' expectations, even setting up multiple teams to develop different games simultaneously. However, Unreal also comes with built-in benefits that would have taken years of work to replicate with Slipspace:

“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are nearly 25 years old,” explains Chris Matthew, the studio’s art director. “Although 343 has been continually developing it, there are aspects of Unreal that Epic has been working on for some time, which aren’t available to us in Slipspace, and would have required a significant amount of time and resources to try to replicate.”

“Among our main interests are the growth and expansion of our world so that players have more to interact with and experience. Nanite and Lumen [Unreal’s rendering and lighting technologies] offer us the opportunity to do that in a way the industry has never seen before. As artists, it’s incredibly exciting to do that work.”

There’s another built-in benefit: Unreal is familiar to large parts of the video game industry in general. While developers would have to spend time learning to use Slipspace when joining 343, Halo Studios' adoption of the industry-leading engine makes it much simpler to onboard new talent (and the studio is, in fact, hiring for its new projects now):

“It’s not just about how long it takes to get a game to market, but how long it takes us to update the game, bring new content to players, and adapt to what we see our players want,” says Van Wyck. “Part of that is [in how we create the game], but another part is recruitment. How long does it take to prepare someone to create assets that will appear in your game?”

With the switch to Unreal, the access path is shorter, the expertise is already there, and the series can grow much faster and more organically.

The future

Of course, Halo Studios needed to be confident in the switch to Unreal; it’s not a decision taken lightly. The team had to be sure that the first Halo games running on a non-Slipspace engine would look, feel, and sound great. The team began experimenting, resulting in a research project known as Project Foundry, the source of all the new clips we saw today.

“When we decided to create Foundry, at that moment it wasn’t in our plan,” says Van Wyck. “But we needed to take a pause, and ‘validate’ isn’t the right word, but to educate ourselves and understand what our capabilities are and evaluate them, to really know that we’re on the right track.”

"Up until this point, we’ve intentionally been very quiet, but I think [today] is simply about sharing where we are, what our priorities are as a studio, and where the team stands. We’re very proud of what came out of Foundry."

So, what does Foundry represent? The team is clear that it’s not a new game, but it’s also not a traditional technical demo. It’s not simply an exploration of what’s possible with this engine, but a true reflection of what would be needed for a new Halo game using Unreal, and a training tool to understand how to get to that point. Foundry has been created with the same rigor, process, and fidelity as a fully released game.

“In places where this type of work has historically been done, across the industry, there can be a lot of smoke and mirrors,” explains Matthews. “Sometimes it leads players down paths where they think it’s going to be one thing, and then it turns out to be something else. The spirit of Foundry is completely the opposite of that.”

"Everything we’ve done is built to the standards we need for the future of our games. We were very intentional about not venturing into the territory of technical demos. We created things that we truly believe in, and the content we’ve created (or at least a good portion of it) could travel anywhere within our future games if we choose to do so."

Hintze goes further: “We can say that it is our intention for most of what we show in Foundry to be expected to be in projects we are developing or future projects.”

What we’ve seen from Foundry promises incredible things. The project, named after Foundry in Halo’s lore (the central forge of the megastructure used to create the Halo rings), saw the team set out to create three distinct biomes in the style of Halo. The goal was, as Matthews puts it, to create something old, something new, and something truly strange.

For something old, we see a Pacific Northwest-inspired biome, a staple of the series, but in a dramatically new form. Waterfalls crash against the mountains, a running stream becomes the site of a battle between Master Chief and two Covenant Elites, and the team pushed Unreal to include as much foliage as technically possible.

For something new, we see the Coldlands, a region trapped in deep freeze, with glaciers covering plateaus and ice reflecting what’s above while refracting what’s below. For something strange, we see Blightlands, a new take on a Halo location, a world consumed by the Flood parasite. The express purpose of Blightlands was to see how this new-look Halo team could push the world itself beyond previous Halo games; the results speak for themselves.

Even the familiar feels new in Foundry. Master Chief’s armor has been meticulously modeled, down to the individual panels on his combat gloves. An Elite’s energy sword now feels less like a solid object and more like a reflection of its name: a crackling hiss of dangerous energy. The goal wasn’t just to push the studio, but the engine itself: Foundry is designed to do things we haven’t seen in Unreal-powered games across the industry. Halo began its life as a graphical showcase for the original Xbox console; the goal is for it to be that way again.

Halo Studios has worked closely with the creators of Unreal, Epic Games, to ensure they can reach that ambitious goal.

“Halo is an incredible franchise, and it’s wonderful to see Halo Studios already pushing the boundaries of Unreal Engine 5,” said Bill Clifford, Vice President and General Manager of Unreal Engine at Epic Games. “We’re honored to support the Halo team in bringing their creative visions to life through Unreal Engine. The work from Project Foundry demonstrates how they can bring Halo to life with beautiful, detailed worlds without compromise.”

Of course, the soul of Halo isn’t just in how it looks, but also in how it feels: the intrinsic dance of its combat, the sound of the weapons, and the sensation of wearing Master Chief’s armor. While Foundry may be primarily a visual project, Halo Studios is deeply committed to retaining the essence of what players love about Halo:

“I think it’s pretty well known that [switching engines] has been a topic the studio has thought about for a long, long time,” says Van Wyck. “[The release of] Unreal Engine 5 was when we felt that we could make Halo games that honored and reflected the true soul of Halo while also being able to create games that could deliver the scale and ambition of the content players want.”

“The spirit of Halo is more than just the visuals,” agrees Matthews. “It’s the story. It’s the physics. When playing as Master Chief, you become this massive soldier tank; it’s the way it moves and feels. We’re very focused on what players love about Halo. We’re constantly listening to their feedback, and that’s at the core of any initiative like Foundry, or any intention the studio has about how we move forward.”

“We think about the intangibles,” adds Hintze. “The interaction with Master Chief, or your Spartan, or the enemies. We’re very careful with the decisions we make in that space, down to the accuracy and authenticity of the weapons, the authenticity of the animations. There’s a list of nuances we use to ensure we’re on the right path.”

Beyond the Visible

Let's talk about what's next beyond Foundry. As expected, the team isn’t revealing exactly what those new games will be at this moment: we are at the beginning of this new chapter, not in the final stages, and it’s safe to say that a new Halo game isn’t imminent. Halo Infinite will continue to be supported on the Slipspace engine: you can expect more operations and updates for its Forge mode. In esports, the fourth year of the Halo Championship Series, which uses Halo Infinite, has just been announced. However, behind the scenes, the next steps for Halo are already being planned.

The silence is intentional. Hintze makes it clear that the priority right now is to do the work, not just talk about it:

"One of the things I really wanted to move away from was the constant insinuation of possibilities and 'must-haves.' We should do more and say less. For me, I truly believe it’s important that we maintain the stance we have now when it comes to our franchise: the level of humility, the level of service to the Halo fans."

"We should talk about things when we have things to talk about, on a large scale. Today, it’s the first step: we’re showing Foundry because we feel it’s the right time; we want to explain our plans to Halo fans and attract new passionate developers to our team. The next step will be to talk about the games themselves."

What’s clear is that, yes, it’s Halo games (plural) that are currently in development. While in Halo Infinite, almost the entire studio focused on a single evolving project, Halo Studios has recalibrated:

"We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions for success in servicing Halo Infinite," says Hintze. "[But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on creating multiple new experiences with the highest possible quality."

An important part of this shift has been the reorganization of the entire Halo Studios structure, with the goal of giving development teams what they need to create something new.

"At the end of the day, if we create the games our players want to play, that’s how we’ll succeed," explains Van Wyck. "That’s what should drive what we create. That’s also what this structure has done: we want the people who day in and day out create the games to be the ones making decisions about them."

The team will also seek more input from outside the studio on those decisions:

"We're seeking feedback earlier and more broadly from our players," she continues. "We started that with The Master Chief Collection, continued with Halo Infinite, and we want to do it even more for our upcoming projects. At the end of the day, it's not just about how we evaluate it, but how our players evaluate it."

343 Industries was founded to create Halo games, but the impression I have is that, in its new incarnation as Halo Studios, the studio has been redesigned to fully focus on that goal—no distractions, no obstacles—creating better games with the hopes and desires of the players at the center of the task.

"You asked me why we consider this a new chapter," said Hintze. "We want a singular focus. We’re all here to make the best Halo games possible."

Source: news.xbox.com