All Future Halo Games Will be Developed Using Unreal Engine 5

gamingbolt.com:

Reports have claimed for close to a couple of years at this point that 343 Industries is ready to ditch its proprietary Slipspace Engine and instead move to Unreal Engine 5 instead, and that’s now been officially confirmed. Not only has the studios rebranded itself as Halo Studios, it has been announced that all future Halo titles are going to be built on Unreal Engine 5. 

As explained by Elizabeth van Wyck, COO at Halo Studios, continuing to work with Slipspace wouldn’t allow the studio to work in the manner that it wishes to going forward. “The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future,” she said. “So part of the conversation we had was about how we help the team focus on making games, versus making the tools and the engines.”

“It’s not just about how long it takes to bring a game to market, but how long it takes for us to update the game, bring new content to players, adapt to what we’re seeing our players want,” she added. “Part of that is [in how we build the game], but another part is the recruiting. How long does it take to ramp somebody up to be able to actually create assets that show up in your game?” (Note: Halo Studios – then known as 343 Industries – was one of several Xbox studios to be affected by mass layoffs in January 2023 that saw over 10,000 job cuts across all of Microsoft.)

Halo Studios’ 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