Microsoft rebrands 343 Industries to Halo Studios, reveals new direction for ‘Halo’ franchise
In a surprise reveal, Microsoft announced a new direction for the Halo series, which includes switching out its engine and changing the name of its main development studio.
The news came right before the final match in this year’s Halo World Championship tournament, held at the Seattle Convention Center from Oct. 4 to 6. In a short prerecorded video titled “A New Dawn,” several of Halo’s lead developers discussed the new direction they plan to take.
The first step in this initiative is a new name. 343 Industries is now Halo Studios, with Pierre Hintze remaining in place as studio head.
“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters,” Hintze said in a Xbox blog post. “Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2 – 343 Industries.”
Hintze continued, “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.”
As part of that new chapter, future Halo games will be made with Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, rather than 343 Industries’ proprietary Slipspace software engine.
“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” said Chris Matthews, studio art director at Halo Studios. “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.”
In addition, the switch-up means that new employees at Halo Studios can bring previous Unreal experience with them to the company, instead of having to start the job by learning how to use Slipspace.
The gameplay footage shown in “A New Dawn” was made using Unreal, but studio executives were careful to say that the footage shouldn’t be taken as a game announcement. Instead, it’s the result of what was internally codenamed Project Foundry, where Halo Studios worked to explore what was possible with Unreal Engine 5.
“We’ve intentionally been really quiet up to this point,” said Halo Studios COO Elizabeth Van Wyck. “[Today] is about just sharing where we are, what our priorities are as a studio, and where the team is.”
While future Halo projects are reportedly in the works using Unreal, Halo Studios has been deliberately quiet about what those projects might be.
Halo Infinite will continue to be supported using the Slipspace engine, and has already announced the next season of its professional esports circuit. At time of writing, the winner of this year’s Halo World Championships had yet to be determined.
Today’s surprise announcement follows on news from last year that 343 Industries had been heavily impacted by Microsoft’s massive layoffs in January 2023, and faced a substantial internal reorganization as a result.
Halo is considered a tentpole franchise for Microsoft’s gaming arm. The first game in the series, 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved, was a launch title for the original Xbox and is widely credited with being responsible for the console’s success.
343 Industries was founded in 2007 to take over development on the Halo series from Bungie, which announced its independence from Microsoft in the same year. However, 343’s time as the sole driving force behind Halo has been widely seen as a mixed bag, with particular criticism directed at the setting and story. Now, with the rebranding and new engine, Halo is officially starting over.