Halo Studios to Reveal What’s Next for the Franchise in October

Halo Studios, the new name of Halo: Infinite developer 343 Industries, will soon have some news to share after announcing in October that it was shifting its game development pipeline to Unreal Engine 5. Yesterday, the company addressed the rumors and speculations regarding the future of the Halo franchise and asked fans to wait for the Halo World Championship in Seattle in October.

“Over the past few weeks, there’s been a fair amount of speculation about when and where more details might emerge about any of the multiple projects Halo Studios is actively working on. We don’t usually comment on such matters, but this time we want to enter the chat and share a little more perspective for Halo fans who might be on the fence about whether to attend this year’s event,” Halo Studios said in a blog post published yesterday.

“Speculation is always fun, but if you want the official scoop on what Halo Studios has been working on, you won’t want to miss this year’s Halo World Championship,” the developer added. We already know that Halo Studios is working on multiple Unreal-powered projects, and one of them could be a remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved game released back in 2001 on the original Xbox.

When Halo Studios announced its transition to Unreal Engine, the company said that it was “entering the next chapter of the franchise and changing the recipe for how we make Halo games.” Halo: Infinite, the latest game in the series, was created using a new in-house Slipspace engine. It ultimately failed to recapture the magic of the original Bungie trilogy despite the switch to an open-world formula for the campaign, and the multiplayer mode becoming free-to-play.

Whatever comes next for Halo, the future of the IP is likely going to be multiplatform. We’ve already seen the Forza Horizon and Age of Empires franchises make the jump to PlayStation consoles, while the upcoming Gears of War: Reloaded will be released on PS5 on day one on August 26. Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, previously said that he was not seeing any “red lines” in the company’s portfolio that would justify making its games forever exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem.