343 Industries rebrands as Halo Studios and ditches its Slipspace Engine in favor of Unreal

343 Industries has suddenly rebranded. The studio not only changed its name, but also revised its approach to making new games based on the Halo franchise.

Project Foundry

Rebranding 343 Industries to Halo Studios marks a new chapter in the history of the company, according to studio head Pierre Hintze. He added that “we’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games.”

As part of this transformation, the team will abandon its proprietary Slipspace Engine in favor of Unreal Engine. Here are some of the reasons why Halo Studios has chosed Epic Games’ technology:

• Some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old, so the engine doesn’t have certain features that would take a lot of resources to replicate;
• Halo Studios plans to leverage UE5’s built-in tools like Nanite and Lumen to expand its future game worlds and make them more technologically advanced;
• Unreal Engine is widely adopted in the games industry, making it easier to hire and onboard new developers.

To test the capabilities of Unreal Engine and see how next Halo games might look like, the team created a research project called Project Foundry. Halo Studios says it is not a tech demo, but rather a “true reflection of what would be required for a new Halo game using Unreal, and a training tool for how to get there.”

The studio is now working on several new Halo games, although there is no information about them at this point. To achieve this goal, Halo Studios is also reorganizing its structure to support the development of multiple projects, with COO Elizabeth van Wyck saying that “we want the people that are day-in-day-out making the games to be the ones to make the decisions on the games.”