Making the Right Bet (Premium)

I'm not particularly good at prognostication, but sometimes you can just see the future unfolding in front of you. This was the case for me when Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi announced Recall at the Copilot+ PC launch event this past May, as I've recounted repeatedly. And it was the case last night, when Microsoft surprised us by awkwardly confirming that it was moving Halo to the Unreal Engine 5 game engine, dropping its aging and out-of-date Slipspace engine. That is, I could already see the complaints in my brain as if they were already real.

If you're confused by why anyone would complain about such a thing, good for you. No, I mean it. We live in a state of perpetual cynicism these days, and it's heightened in communities like ours that feel perpetually under attack. You can drill down from Microsoft to Xbox to 343 Industries–sorry, Halo Studios now–and feel the waves of complaints washing over you at any turn. These are companies, businesses, entities of whatever kind that just can't seem to do anything right. And that's in the eyes of their biggest fans. An audience that feels victimized by what it sees as an ongoing series of missteps.

So if you didn't immediately suffer from a knee-jerk reaction to lash out at Microsoft–or Xbox, or 343–for this change, then God bless you. There's still some iota of common sense, logic, and maybe even goodwill in your heart.

But if you did immediately suffer from this reaction, if you were so incensed by this that you turned to whatever outlet you have to vent these feelings–Reddit, YouTube, whatever social network, or even here at Thurrott.com (not that I've noticed that here, thankfully)–I get you. And it's (probably) not your fault. You are victimized. It's just that it's not Microsoft, Xbox, or 343 doing the victimizing. It's whatever social forces have spread in recent years to turn what used to be reasonable discourse into pure hatred of those others who think differently than you, disagree with you, and, come to think of it, aren't even people anywhere. We've been fed such a steady diet of hate for so many years, it's difficult to even think straight.

I'm not sure what anyone is mourning when they express their displeasure at this strategy change. But I can tell you what they're missing.

I can also tell you that the game engine Halo uses is almost beside the point, given the bigger issues that I believe 343 has wrought during its tenure of the franchise. As I wrote in Halo Infinite, Game Updates, and the Future of Xbox (Premium) back in January, Halo is in trouble. It's in trouble in the same way that Star Wars is in trouble, and for the same reasons: Something other than the people responsible for this IP is in charge now and their work–both coincidentally expressed in trilogies of content–is lackluster at best, and permanently damaging to franchise at worst.

With Halo specifically, I've pointed out that the initial (Bungie-made) trilogy, plus the ODST side-game for Halo 3 were so...