Halo officially moves to UE5, Halo Studios now in charge of Halo

Not a huge Halo fan, but this looks like a great move.

Apparently, there's a new team in charge of Halo and they are already working on a few projects and hiring new staff. What say you?

343 was rebranded into Halo Studios; it's the same team.

That being said, yes, this is a great move. A proper Halo is a such a massive undertaking that they don't need to spend the time or money building out a proprietary game engine.

Also, it'll make it much easier to put it on multiple platforms. :)

This makes no sense. They have ID tech and other technologies and they still want to outsource the engine.🙄

To be fair, 343 lost a TON of people after Infinite's failure, both willingly and during the layoffs.

Its not unreasonable to say that it is a new team. There's also a new leadership team.

I'd like to see a Halo RPG in the vein of Mass Effect, and a Halo game in the vein of The Division

I agree that ID Tech is probably more flexible and scalable, UE5 has the advantage of being more universal and you can hire new team that can hit the ground running without learning a new engine.

One of the issues 343 had was teaching new team how to use Slipspace, which was difficult due to limited tools and documentation.

Colleges are using Unity and UE4/5 in their game development programs, making the transition easy.

Definitely interested in seeing what gets produced from this.

Well i'm not holding my breath they have disappointed thus far with the campaign and no co-op until that comes back with a least a 9 out of 10 it's not the Halo we know and love.

@navyguy21:

How is ID Tech more scalable and flexible if Unreal is more universal? Unreal certainly has its issues but Xbox Game Studios has been working towards getting their teams over to Unreal for years now. It's incredibly powerful, scalable and, integrates very well across a variety of pipelines. It's a great choice for a company that is working towards a play anywhere future.

It seems like mobile is becoming more important to them, that King is the reason they wanted to buy ABK. Unreal Engine works well across many platforms including mobile, it is scalable and supports a wide variety of features and can fall back gracefully on lower end hardware. MS wants to provide games for PC and could also have a portable Xbox in mind.

UE has a lot of industry support and developers are familiar with it so it is easier to being people on compared to a custom in house engine that is not widely licensed if commercially available at all and may have a lot of tech debt.

Maybe these are considerations they are making with this choice to put Halo in the most flexible position.

All of that is true. Unity is what we teach at our university. But, a company at MS scale, they should be pushing their own engine, that will take advantage of their hardware and software. Relying on third party when you are as large as MS just feels like a poor choice (they are really good at poor choices). At the same time, there is not a single game engine that utilizes all that Direct 12 Ultimate optimization. So,🤷🏽‍♀️

Just let it die

“The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future. 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.”

Unreal also comes with in-built benefits that would have taken years of work to replicate with Slipspace:

“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” explains Studio Art Director, Chris Matthews. “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.

There’s another in-built benefit – Unreal is familiar to huge parts of the wider gaming industry. Where developers would have to spend time learning how to use Slipspace when joining 343, Halo Studios’ adoption of the industry-leading engine makes it a far smoother process to bring in new talent

Link

Seems like what most people were thinking. My main hope is they make a good game regardless of what engine they use.

@navyguy21: exciting times. Slip space was fantastic but sadly a ton of noob devs don't know how to work with it and forced a shift to UE5. We'll, at least we will get better content faster now. Looking forward to seeing the next halo.

I'm wondering if maybe it's a Frostbite engine situation; apparently that engine only makes sense to the folks at DICE and is a nightmare to work with for other studios that haven't used it before?

Although that sort of sounds like what the situation with Slipspace was, so... *shrug*

Is Id Tech user friendly? Would hope so, given the history of modding games from Id.

ID Tech has had multicore support for a long time, something even UE5 just recently added (and had to patch).

Also, ID Tech is the only engine I know that leads with optimization. They wanted the engine to be as optimized as possible, and then built games around it. UE5 is about adding features and then trying to optimize later (or just cut features or wait for more powerful hardware). Epic's solution was to implement an internal upscaler rather than optimize the engine.

That had more to do with id giving out the source code to their engines so people could get familiar with it and tweak it. That stopped once they were purchased.

In the past their engines were licensed and used for other games and they were strong in that space.

Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) is definitely the perfect choice for upcoming Halo games. The stunning environments and combat nature of the game will fit right into the UE5 ecosystem. Hopefully, they'll test-run the engine with the possible Halo: CE Remake would be a good start. And moving to UE5 also means they are within a couple of hours of The Coalition and can easily get access to talent coming over to lend on-site expertise. Smart move from MS.

This is correct. In-house built engines are often more trouble than it's worth these days. Engines like UE5 is versatile enough to make most kinds of games, and hiring becomes significantly easier because devs are already familiar with the tools. There's also a reason why CDPR for example is ditching the REDengine for UE5 on their next Witcher game.

@davillain: as much as I think a halo CE remake would be amazing, I am sick and tired of these remakes and remasters. I'll be glad if MS doesn't do any of that stuff and leaves it up to Sony instead.

Rumors also state Halo CE remake coming to PS5 so its yet another Xbox console game that play best on PS platforms.

Likely the reason they move to UE5 is that they could hire contractors and not needing to teach them a lot. Win for MS they dont need to hire permanent staff.

They changed their name and are still working on the same franchise...

Look, I hope they pull it off and release a new Halo game that becomes my new favorite game in the franchise. However, I have my doubt. Either way, time will tell and I wish them good luck. May e the name change will increase sales.

They're gonna continue Halo? Mkay, good luck with that.

Honestly at this point produce another ODST type game hand it off to vicarious visions or someone from the COD stable and let them handle it.

Halo Infinite Too... or Bust!!! :P

The engine change might be signaling a multiplatform push as well.

Looks about as good as I expected a standard AAA current gen game to look in 2020. Nothing special but at least up to standard.

I guess it good they are working to get their biggest name franchise up to bare minimum standard for current gen games 4 years later.

Nice to see that the studio is now able to build 3d assets in Unreal! Now all they have to do is build an actual game.

I wish that these takeovers would allow for some more smart use of tech and developers:

• Make use of IDtech, it's the best engine for FPS and you own the studio that has exclusive rights to it.
• Unreal Engine will make it feel like any other UE shooter, idtech could've given it its own face
• Switch some studios around. Let ID make a new halo entry
• Let Call of Duty devs make something else, a new IP
• Let Halo devs work on something else, DOOM or Quake or Wolfenstein

Also remember this is only a UE5 "work in progress" build, disregarding the fact that what's shown is more or less on par with the ORIGINAL 2018 "work in progress" Halo Infinite trailer ,which MS already lied about, this basically means nothing.

No doubt it will be easier for them to port to Microsoft Windows PC now with Unreal.

I know - why not use ID Tech? This is a weird move. I hope it pans out, though.

If it's true they're remaking Halo CE then most of the hard work has already been done for them haha

This time they have said "We were very intentional about not stepping into tech demo territory." so they are saying this is not like the 2018 Halo Infinite trailer.

Read above post as I already explained it.

The game is already multiplatform.🤷🏽‍♂️

LOL, what did MS lie about?

Good to see they are doing a bit of an overhaul. The series is in dire need of a reboot. Possibly separate the MP and SP campaigns completely (with maybe some light tie in stuff for the MP if you buy a campaign). But yeah...they have been flogging a corpse for long enough at this stage. Complete reboot. Start again. Forget the existing story. Clean sheet of paper.

The change in engine....pluses and minus's I suppose. The big one is getting people who know how to use the engine: UE is much better than ID and other in house engines in that regard since anyone can download and play around with it. Frostbite and IDtech have proven to be problematic when taken out of their comfort zone. With enough dev time and resources, that could be fixed. But companies don't want to spend the time and resources. So with UE they will have an easier time of getting people in who can hit the ground running. If they stay on then they can also learn the other in house engines.

But, on a somewhat related topic,....what has been up with MS and gaming tech this gen? Tooling too. On paper, they have the most powerful console (for now) and nothing they have released really shows it off. They develop DX and work with hardware manufacturers to put in stuff like VRS, Mesh Shaders, Direct Storage/Velocity architecture and all the other bits that come with DX12U......and do SFA with it. Then we have instances where some tech works on the PS5 and not the XSX (Ray tracing at launch with the Calisto protocol comes to mind). So their own games haven't really set the standard on Xbox and 3rd parties are running into unexpected issues. Apparently they are also slow to respond to developer queries and issues.

Back in the OgXbox and 360 days MS were great with the tooling. They basically set the standard. Developers were also generally positive about working on their platforms. Very strange.

Hopefully they use some of that MS money to really impress again.

It's possible that this could be the case. You never know if you could end up with something like Unity where they wanted to start charging per-install fees to developers. Some developers reconsidered their investment in that engine and put in more effort moving their game to another engine, right in the middle of development.

Luckily Microsoft seems to have a good relationship with Epic. They partnered before on GoW, and it seems unlikely that they would repeat the mistake that happened at Unity.

One benefit of an in-house engine is you control every aspect of it and optimize it to the strengths of the hardware, ensuring it takes advantage of all of the Xbox features for example. Another benefit is you can license it out to others so that more developers can work on it and be familiar with it, the way Epic did with Unreal Engine, and collect licensing fees too. Maybe Microsoft doesn't want to get into that business.

There can be advantages to either approach, and Microsoft seems to have weighed the options when they arrived at the conclusion that they should move forward with UE. Hopefully they will be able to make a good game that fans of the series will enjoy, and also make new fans. I wonder what they will do to set it apart from other modern shooters?

Very smart move, should've been done years ago.

Looks like they are going full on woke and full on multiplatform.

You know what I mean...

Of course...port begging!

Miss me with that one lol. I was a huge Halo fan on the of Xbox and 360.

I am just stating the facts.

What do you mean full on woke? What happened?

Oh boy! I can't wait to be disappointed in the results.

Hopefully removing technical hurdles by adopting UE5 helps them focus on getting their shit together.

Doing a Halo CE Remake using UE5 is a good test run so we gotta give that a chance to shine. MS rarely does Remakes/Remasters, and besides, I used to believe CE is still fun to play but man, its hard to play it now after my experience with Halo Infinite's gameplay, it's hard to go back to CE now. My CE nostalgic blindsided me from seeing the truth it really does need a Remake😅

I think KVally is talking about the Chief of Staff at Halo Studio background is in question...and judging my most Halo fans reaction, I can understand their concern and reasoning behind it. It remains to be seen and we should judge on the game itself, not by background individuals. I myself will remind open-minded but if I see something I don't like, I'm gonna call it out and tell it like it is.

And not because she's a Woman, but her background is...a concern I should add.

Surprised, gamers targeting a woman and a woman of color for bonus points in gaming. Despite not being a developer we definitely need to keep an eye on her like we do with all Chief of staff in gaming. Nothing unusual about this behavior. 🙄

Cows can only dream of a franchise as big as halo on playstation.

Remember when some thought they acquired halo when the bought bungie.... priceless 😂🤣