Xbox has announced that its Halo team is making massive changes moving forward, not only re-branding to 'Halo Studios' but also moving to an entirely new game-making toolset with Unreal Engine 5. This means that what was 343 Industries is completely ditching its proprietary 'Slipspace Engine' used to develop Halo Infinite - and the team has explained exactly why it's made that decision.
Over on Xbox Wire, multiple Halo Studios devs have talked about the move, and how it's going to set the team up for a more fruitful future using UE5. The old Slipspace Engine got the job done in Infinite, but it was a bit of a tech behemoth, and using it slowed the team down when developing the last mainline Halo game.
"The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future. So part of the conversation we had was about how we help the team focus on making games, versus making the tools and the engines.
Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,
Although 343 were developing it 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."
Another major reason behind the switch came down to Unreal Engine's popularity within the industry, and how it's less of a learning curve for new team members to get on board with. "With the move to Unreal, the on-ramp is shorter, the experience is there, and the series can grow far more quickly and organically than ever before" is how Halo Studios puts it, which sounds like another valid reason to make the move.
All of this makes us quite excited about the future of Halo over at Xbox. Infinite was and still is a great video game, but it does feel a little unwieldy, and we all know that its entry into the market wasn't exactly smooth. Let's hope the team can successfully recreate the feel of Halo over on UE5!