During the Halo World Championship 2024, the developers behind the franchise, formerly called 343 Industries, announced major changes to their studio and workflow.
First of all, the Microsoft-owned studio will be rebranded as Halo Studios, once more pledging their dedication to the Halo series. They will also move to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, which will free the company from the requirement to develop and maintain their own engine, enabling them to focus on developing games.
We hear that there are “multiple projects” in development in Unreal Engine 5, but the only one that was announced today, code-named “Project Foundry” is not a game that will be completed and sold in the traditional sense.
Project Foundry is defined as “a multi-discipline research project designed to explore the creative potential of Unreal for the next generation of Halo games.”
The video below shows several scenes which have been created within Project Foundry, aiming to see what can be done with the engine and to give new life to the legacy assets created for previous games, bringing them up to modern standards.
We hear that Halo Infinite, which received a quite lukewarm welcome from the fans, especially at the beginning, was the last remnant of how Halo games were made in the past, representing 343 Industries’ “recipe.”
What the studio is doing at the moment is “changing that recipe.”
Interestingly, the studio is also hiring across several disciplines, which may sound quite counterintuitive considering that it suffered extensive layoffs in rather recent times.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see what they’ll manage to cook for the next generation of Halo games, but for now, they remain tight-lipped. As soon as something is revealed, we will be sure to share it with you.
