Halo's future as an Unreal Engine game looks both handsome and boring, going by these "Project Foundry" videos

rockpapershotgun.com:

Halo creators 343 Industries are having a bit of a glow-up. They're now calling themselves Halo Studios, a piece of rhetorical doubling-down that reminds me of those dril tweets about "James Bond, author of James Bond". They've also abandoned the proprietary Slipspace game engine used by Halo Infinite in favour of Epic's Unreal Engine 5, which will be the basis for "multiple new games". To celebrate the occasion, Halo Studios have released some footage of Project Foundry, an expansive Unreal Engine 5 prototype and spawning vat for actual Halo games, which is billed by the Xbox Newswire as a kind of ur-Halo - "a true reflection of what would be required for a new Halo game using Unreal, and a training tool for how to get there".

Going by the Foundry video, what's required of a new Halo game using Unreal is essentially: much the same worlds, much the same props, much the same characters and enemies, but shinier and more detailed, with additional armour scratches and leaves and whatnot - perhaps a touch of bonus swazzle for your plasma sword, some stylishly worn edges for your pistol, a few more snowflakes for your snowdrift. Classic Next Gen larks. "The potential for Halo, right now, is huge", intones studio head Pierre Hintze at one point, against the backdrop of a developer pointing at a very small dent on Master Chief's ear.

New helmet dents aside, Halo Studios are switching to Unreal Engine 5 for some fairly straightforward practical reasons. One is that it saves them time creating, updating and maintaining their own tools - as the developers note, parts of the Slipspace engine are technically 25 years old, though I imagine the same is true of Unreal Engine's latest incarnations. In particular, the developers seemingly want to push out game updates at a faster rate than with Halo Infinite, which launched without certain features such as a proper splitscreen campaign and Forge mode (it never did get splitscreen in the end).

"We believe that the consumption