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surprised us by awkwardly confirming that it was moving Halo to the Unreal Engine 5 game engine, dropping its aging and out-of-date Slipspace engine.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 good that I played their single player campaigns multiple times each, all the way through, and spent several years playing multiplayer too. Meanwhile, the 343 trilogy was so uninteresting and uninspired that I had the same experience with each, where I attempted to play for some amount of time, got bored, and gave up. These games are just a rehash of the past, a “same old, same old” situation. Oddly, I’ve spent more time with Halo Infinite than the other two–it coincided with me weaning myself off Call of Duty–and it’s so bland and pointless that I’ve described it as a cure for a video game addiction. This franchise is in trouble.

But back to what the critics are missing. It’s a long list, so I’ll stick to the basics.

Creating, maintaining, and supporting a proprietary game engine is incredibly expensive and thankless, especially when it’s only used in-house, will never be licensed to a third party, and is always playing catch-up with market leaders like Unreal Engine 5 (which they chose), Unity, Id Tech, or whatever else. 343 was forced to maintain two sides of its house, one dedicated to making the games–the actual point of this business–and one dedicated to the engine work.

This is similar to the conversation we used to have around companies moving their email and storage infrastructures to the cloud–the company was started to make widgets (or whatever), not to employ hundreds of people for in-house and external communication and file storage–and how those in charge of that infrastructure fought that evolution.

Whatever anyone thinks of Halo graphically or whatever, it’s been behind the market leaders for many years. And the problems related to this fact only multiply when you look at how much time, effort, and money must be spent just to keep up with those market leaders. And how difficult it is to hire anyone to work on these games because no one out in the market understands your in-house engine. And even when you hire people, they need to be trained on the new engine, which is itself expensive and time-consuming.

But the ignorance is real. By which I mean, people with absolutely no stake in this decision, no understanding of the cost and effort involved, or just vague ideals that don’t align with reality, nonetheless have their opinions. I sometimes think of this as quintessentially American, or perhaps quintessentially middle-aged white guy, but it boils down to, I don’t know anything about this topic, but allow me now lecture you on what it means. The less they know, the stronger the argument. The loudest people arguing their point, as it turns out, are often the least knowledgeable.

“I don’t like every game studio migrating to a single engine,” is a typical example of this opinion, one that is, at least, not overly aggressive. “What you own is always the best tech.”

It’s not. And it’s actually more common for a company that does own whatever infrastructure, whatever assets, to lean on that thing for far too long than it is for that same company to make the right decision, stop throwing good money after bad, and focus on what’s really important. And while it’s painful to even consider that this needs to be explained, what’s most important in video games is–wait for it–the game. I know. It’s as stunning in its simplicity as it is in being obvious.

Game play matters. For single player games, the story matters. For multiplayer games, it might be interactivity, or replayability, or whatever the game requires. Graphics are important. They can help tell the story or the action, or whatever, or at least frame it. But it is perhaps not coincidental that the best-selling video game console of this generation is the Nintendo Switch, the only one that did not chase after 4K or 8K graphics running at high frame rates. Nintendo, the Disney of this industry, knows what matters most.

This argument is eerily reminiscent of the complaints that arose when Microsoft announced that it was dropping its in-house Trident web rendering engine–which was also aging and out-of-date, and always playing catch-up–to adopt Chromium. There are people reading this right now that still believe this was a mistake, that putting too much power in one company’s hands is wrong, that what that market needs is diversity of whatever kind. But those critics were wrong, and still are. Microsoft was right to focus on what mattered, and there are only two things that matter with web browsers. They have to just work, with no compatibility issues, and that’s exactly what standardizing on the low-level rendering engine gave it. And they can then differentiate on features and user interface, which is all users care about once the first issue is rendered (sorry) moot.

The parallels between Edge and Halo continue when you consider what did or will make them great in the eyes of fans. That is, Edge will sink or swim on its qualities as a web browser–again, obvious, but again, we for whatever reason need to state the obvious here–and not on Microsoft’s ability to keep its rendering engine up to date while also trying to make a great web browser, both at great cost.

Likewise, Halo will sink or swim going forward based on the strength of the games. That they will be graphically excellent is now assured. But less obviously, this means that Halo Studios can now more easily hire talent, talent that is better and will be ready to go on day one. And they are, in fact, actively hiring. More important, of course, is the stories. And that, for now, is a mystery. Just as was the eventual feature-set of Edge when Microsoft first announced that switch.

But there is one big difference between Edge’s move to Chromium and Halo‘s move to Unreal 5: There is nothing in Halo today that can’t work with Unreal 5. With Edge, Microsoft was forced to drop certain features permanently or temporarily, and I’m sure there are still some Edge fans out there that miss certain functionality from the pre-Chromium days. Halo, meanwhile, is in tough shape. I have a hard time imagining that whatever comes next won’t be a big improvement. It almost has to be.

Don’t mourn a game rendering engine. Especially one that was so out-of-date and lackluster. There’s only one reaction to the demos Microsoft showed off as part of its Unreal 5 announcement: Bliss. It looks great. And that’s fantastic, because it frees Microsoft–or Xbox or Halo Studios–to focus on what’s really important. In other words, it made the right bet. For itself, for the games, and for the beleaguered fans who have put up with Halo Infinite as if it were anything other than uninteresting same old, same old.

It’s a new era. (Or, “a new dawn,” apparently.) We’re all ready for something better. Including, I suspect, PlayStation fans. There’s another thing we can fret over, I guess.