Future Halo Games Moving to Unreal Engine 5 as 343 Rebrands, Multiple Projects in Development

The future of Halo is starting to come into focus. During Sunday's Halo World Championships, 343 Industries made a number of announcements, including that it will officially be changing its name to Halo Studios and that it's working on multiple new games. In addition, the newly-rebranded studio say that all future projects will be developed on Unreal Engine, leaving behind the Slipspace Engine utilized by Halo Infinite.

The announcements were unveiled in a seven-minute video shown ahead of the Halo World Championship's grand finals, which showcased the results of Project Foundry — an experimental project designed to show a Halo game built using the Unreal Engine. While it's not much more than a tech demo, it offers a glimpse at a fresh beginning for Xbox's flagship franchise in the wake of 2021's Halo Infinite.

“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” art director Chris Matthews said in an interview with Xbox Wire. “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."

An early 2023 report suggested that Halo's developers were ready to hit the reset button on the series after a heavy shakeup within the studio, including transitioning to the Unreal Engine. The report also said that Halo's developers were focusing on pitching new Halo games while prototyping ideas. Project Foundry appears to be the culmination of that effort.