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!
Do you think it was the right move to ditch Slipspace? Tell us your thoughts below!
[source news.xbox.com]
Comments 21
We really are stuck in a cycle of "yes this sucks now but it will get better" aren't we. The good stuff always lurking around the next corner
The Slipcase engine was said to be a problem when Infinite was being made, causing delays because contractors that came in to help with the making of the game had to learn a completely new engine before they could actually get to the point of helping. Moving to Unreal can only be a good thing, and I can see its use becoming more and more of an industry standard.
Hopefully the next Halo will still look and feel like the Halo of old, but will also have a much faster turnaround than Infinite did...
@Fiendish-Beaver 100% It was particularly a problem with Halo Infinite because they had so many contractors and short-term staff. Not being able to work productively also likely exacerbated this and made people want to leave. Unreal Engine has it's flaws but the pros outweigh the cons and the more devs experienced with it will be able to mitigate or sidestep most of those flaws. Very sensible decision.
Great decision and let’s not forget the coalition are using U5 and have lots of experience in Unreal overall, so cross studios that should help.
I thought they would’ve switched to ID engine now as that’s owned in-house.
But UE5 is good to.
They are ditching their old game engine because the game engine is old.
It makes sense - spend time rebuilding the engine or trying to bolt on 'new' methods (RT Lighting for example) to modernise it has been increasingly problematic.
As they also said, they spent too much time on being a 'tech' company instead of a Development Studio - trying to rebuild and/or modernise Slipspace into a 'modern' game engine built to deliver the 'modern' features/graphics expected - things like Real Time Lighting with material properties to react to light in real time.
UE5 will allow Devs to focus on Game Development and leave the 'tech' stuff to a tech company. Not only that, they have 'experts' in UE5 within their Studio's who can help. It was impossible to get 'outside' help with Halo when few understood 'Slipspace' and even fewer had the technical knowledge if/when problems occured due to how long its been in use and how its been modified and updated over the many years its been used.
It really boils down to those factors. It doesn't make sense to spend years building a 'new' bespoke engine or rebuilding the old 'bespoke' engine. In both cases, it means a lot of time/work when only that Studio is using it, only that Studio knows how to use it etc when great game engines exist and that MANY will have experience with and have tech experts on hand to help too...
lol they hyped up the engine so much
Someone slap Todd Howard in the back of the head to get his attention. Doesn’t need to be UE5, but I’d like to play a Bethesda game made using a competently designed engine that isn’t 20+ years old.
It would be nice to play without falling through the map, getting stuck in environmental debris, or randomly crashing to the dashboard every 20mins. It would be nice to have competent ai pathfinding. It would be nice to iron out more than 20% of game breaking bugs prior to launch. It would be nice to see some granular details in the environments that help bring them to life, like, oh I don’t know, foliage that gently sways in the breeze instead of static, cardboard cutout trees. It would be nice to focus on story, gameplay and memorable characters instead of how many potatoes can be crammed into a vault before the frames start to chug. It would be nice to play uninterrupted by load screens for more than a few minutes at a time.
It would be nice, just once, to play a BGS game without constantly thinking ‘This is ok, there’s something here, but why doesn’t it look as good as [insert game]? Why doesn’t it feel as responsive to play as [insert game]? Why aren’t these npc’s reacting like in [insert game]? Why isn’t X, Y, or Z as good as in [insert game]?’
@Balaam_
Best comment of the day!
Translation we don't want to spend the money to make a bespoke engine for the current generation and beyond for the type of game we want. So it is cheaper to lease the Toyota Camry engine aka UE[X] since it works today. Then make our game work in that common class engine. I appreciated teams in the past developing their own engines or using the tools of their corporation to make games. It was part of the charm for me when an exclusive was used. Now we will be back to the X360/PS3 age in which so many games were on unreal and they all looked similar. Microsoft should be developing engines among its own studios to push their hardware.
The problem I saw with Halo had much less to do with tech and much more to do with creative vision.
If they've simply changed engine but left this team run by the same people then we are just awaiting another failed product. This was their chance to ressurect this amazing IP, but calling the team a new name doesnt take away the problems this team has had making a compelling story or product.
Id love to be proven wrong, but I wont be, 343 just havent got what it takes whatever their company logo..
@Titntin Most of 343i leadership left, and the studio was affected by massive layoffs… At this point, it basically is a fresh new team, and that we it think they did a name change. To show that this a new team, and not just 343 rebranded.
@Fiendish-Beaver “ causing delays because contractors that came in to help with the making of the game had to learn a completely new engine before they could actually get to the point of helping”
You would think that maybe the cause of all their problems is Microsoft being cheap… and the best thing to do is stop relying on so much contractors. Nope. It completely the engine fault. Left move to UE5 and still rely heavily on contractors.
@AverageGamer I hope thats the case, and I dont have details of who went when, so I'll accept your assesment!
I would have far prefered it if the ip had gone to someone like ID - they would shake it up!
I will hope for a resurgence, but Im not gonna bet on one being delivered.
@Titntin
Mint Blitz said another reason they are rebranding the studio, apart from the fact its almost an entirely new team, especially at the top with Pierre now in charge (after being brought in to fix MCC and nailing that), is that they're not just the 343i studio any more but a collection of studios. Hopefully that doesn't mean playground games is now exclusively Halo and no more Forza Horizon games.
But it does make sense if many new Halo games are being developed.
The Slipspace engine is nothing but a scapegoat. If they actually kept people who knew how the engine worked they'd be fine.
Capcom isn't suffering due to the RE Engine. No one is saying they need to switch to Unreal.
@Vaako007 UE5 is not the same as UE3, can you tell that Hi-Fi Rush, Fortnite and the Matrix demo are all running on the same engine? Not at all.
@MrFrosty "id Tech" YES, I don't understand why Microsoft is not leveraging id Tech across the company. They bought one of the very best engines, arguably even better than Unreal, and could have it license-free as an internal engine.......and they are not leveraging it at all?! I would have thought buying the engine tech was a major reason for purchasing Bethesda.
When the Slipspace engine was announced, Bonnie Ross explained that artists could easily use it.
Does this mean that this was a lie or a mistake?
It seems like the wrong mitigation for the issue of contractors cycling in and out (use an engine that reduces the learning time/complexity for an ever rotating staff of short-term contractors, rather than say use the massive reserves of cash to hire people for the long run to bed in).
I'm sure it will help a bit, but I'm out after Infinite, so unpolished and frankly unfinished at launch. I won't even believe the hype from journalists this time.
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