343 Industries Renamed to Halo Studios with Shift to Unreal Engine 5

It’s a new era for the Halo franchise, with 343 Industries rebranding itself to Halo Studios as it embraces Unreal Engine 5 and its impressive new visuals. Whether better games will come out of this is unclear–the 343 Industries-era games have never lived up to the titles Bungie created before it–but adopting a more popular rendering engine should help attract talent that might have otherwise ignored Halo.

“We start a new chapter today,” Halo Studios head Pierre Hintze says. “I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. So we’re not just going to try to improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games.”

The shift to the Unreal Engine had been rumored for years–we reported on it in October 2022 and January 2023–but it can’t come quickly enough: Halo Infinite, the most recent title in the storied franchise, used a new in-house game engine after the previous two titles didn’t live up to the original Bungie trilogy. But it, too, underdelivered, leaving the franchise in a precarious state.

To make sure Halo could successfully transition to Unreal Engine, the studio created a research project called Foundry to experiment with Unreal 5 and see how Halo’s environments, characters, vehicles, and other in-game elements would look and work. The results, as seen in a new demo video, are visually impressive, and return Halo to its roots as a best-in-class graphics showcase in which the familiar looks even more realistic and beautiful.

Using Unreal Engine will help Halo Studios focus on the content rather than devoting a big team to building and supporting a proprietary game engine and its various tools, and then having to continually train new employees to use them. But this is only part of the solution to Halo‘s problems. Halo Studios has rethought how it creates Halo content and that, to me, is the bigger issue. Halo Infinite was so boring–so much of the same thing over and over again–that I only half-jokingly described it as the cure for a video game addiction.

On that note, Halo Studios is a bit vaguer. It’s not announcing a new Halo game, for starters, nor is it discussing any specific plans for future titles. In fact, it appears to be counting on new hires–it’s actively hiring new talent now, in sharp contrast to the news of this past year–to help to chart some course for the future. But the studio is quite clear that Halo Infinite is the past, and that what it’s doing now is “changing the recipe.”

“A new Halo game isn’t imminent,” the studio noted, just in case you were getting too excited. That said, there are multiple new Halo games in development now. Hopefully remastered Unreal 5-based versions of the original trilogy are among them.

“Halo Infinite will still be supported through the Slipspace Engine – you can expect more Operations, and updates to its Forge mode,” the studio says. “In esports, Year 4 of the Halo Championship Series, using Halo Infinite, has just been announced. But in the background, the next steps for Halo will be taken.”