343 rebrands to Halo Studios, moves to Unreal Engine
The developer of Halo, 343 Industries, is being rebranded as Halo Studios.
In a blog post released alongside a video (below) from the Halo World Championship esports event, the firm also revealed that it was also moving from its proprietary Slipspace Engine to Unreal Engine. This confirms reporting from Bloomberg back in 2023. Furthermore, several projects using Unreal are now in the works at the firm.
Halo Studios is the latest company to move to Unreal Engine rather than using its own tech. CD Projekt, for example, is no longer using its proprietary Red Engine having moved to Epic's software in 2022. As game development becomes more complex and requires more time, having to build and manage your own tech is a huge overhead and complication that honestly has become a headache for many studios. While using a third-party off-the-shelf solution won't entirely eliminate these problems, it certainly reduces them.
“We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed – the expectations of how fast their content is available,” Halo Studios boss Pierre Hintze said.
“On Halo Infinite, we were developing a tech stack that was supposed to set us up for the future, and games at the same time.”
The developer's art director, Chris Matthews, added: “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.
“One of the primary things we’re interested in is growing and expanding our world so players have more to interact with and more to experience. Nanite and Lumen [Unreal’s rendering and lighting technologies] offer us an opportunity to do that in a way that the industry hasn’t seen before. As artists, it’s incredibly exciting to do that work.”
You can check out the announcement video below:
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