343 Industries has rebranded simply as Halo Studios to kickstart a "new chapter" in the iconic series' long history, which includes multiple games in development.
Announced at this weekend's Halo World Championship Series 2024, the series steward unveiled its plan for Master Chief's bright future. The entire team is now switching to Unreal Engine 5 and ditching its proprietary Slipspace tech. A research venture called Project Foundry is laying the groundwork for multiple Halo games. And, the studio's rebrand is more of a turning page for the series as a whole.
"If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters," studio head Pierre Hintze, who took over after Halo Infinite's wonky launch, explains in an Xbox Wire blog. "Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2 – 343 Industries. Now, I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. So we're not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games. So, we start a new chapter today."
Halo Studios also unveiled some jazzy footage of the mysterious Project Foundry, showing multiple biomes that would feel right at home on a classic Halo ring, from forests stretching to the clouds to areas infected by the Flood's spores. Master Chief and some elites also debut their updated, but still very classic, designs in the video below.
Project Foundry is a slightly unconventional announcement, especially since it's been almost three years since Halo Infinite launched, but Halo Studios is clear that everything being built right now is expected to find its way into a future Halo game of some sort.
"Everything we've made is built to the kind of standards that we need to build for the future of our games," studio art director Chris Matthews says. "We were very intentional about not stepping into tech demo territory. We built things that we truly believe in, and the content that we've built – or at least a good percentage of it – could travel anywhere inside our games in the future if we so desire it." Hintze goes one step further to say that everything we see in Foundry is "expected to be in projects we are building, or future projects."
Previous reports claimed the studio was working on "some form" of Halo: Combat Evolved remaster and, with how old-school the character models look now, that wouldn't be surprising. The other Halo games are anyone's guess, though the studio claims switching to Unreal Engine 5 should speed up development significantly since it no longer has to double up as a tech company and a game development studio. It can just focus on one.
Tons of other Halo news dropped this weekend to coincide with the esports event, too. Halo 2's infamous E3 2003 demo is making a comeback for the game's big 20th anniversary, Halo Infinite is getting a third-person mode after decades of fan requests, and that cool Helldivers 2-ish mode made in Forge finally has a release date.
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