343 Industries Rebrands as Halo Studios; Gives First Look of Halo in Unreal Engine 5

In a surprise reveal, 343 Industries has announced that they are rebranding and changing their name to Halo Studios with a first look at “Project Foundry,” a project designed to explore the potential of Unreal Engine 5 with the Halo franchise across multiple games.

As revealed during today’s finals of the 2024 Halo World Championship, 343 Industries is changing names, and not only that, but the Halo franchise is moving to a new engine, Unreal Engine 5. While the team had no new games to reveal, they did have a video reveal that showed Halo running in the engine. 

Dubbed “Project Foundry,” the first look above is more than just a simple tech demo. While Halo Studios clarifies that it’s not the next Halo game, Project Foundry isn’t something they considered to be a tech demo, where it’s shown off but ends up being smoke and mirrors, never to become something later on. No, what you saw in the video is very much real, and meant to be fully possible within their upcoming games.

“Where this type of work’s been done historically, across the industry, it can contain a lot of smoke and mirrors,” Studio Art Director Chris Matthews explains on Xbox Wire. “It sometimes leads players down paths where they believe it’s going to be one thing, and then something else happens. The ethos of Foundry is vigorously the opposite of that.

Everything we’ve made is built to the kind of standards that we need to build for the future of our games. 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.”

As noted in the blog post, the move to Unreal Engine 5 for Halo was mainly due to the age of some of the components in the Slipspace Engine. While it was created to be used for Halo Infinite, some of its components are nearly 25 years old, making it difficult to update and would have required a large amount of time to do so. Unreal Engine, on the other hand, had many of those things already in development for some time, and thus, the move was decided as it would prove more beneficial to the team. 

COO Elizabeth Van Wyck chimed in that the move would also allow them to bring new content and adapt to player wants much quicker, along with helping with recruiting and having people already knowledgable of the engine from the get-go. 

“It’s not just about how long it takes to bring a game to market, but how long it takes for us to update the game, bring new content to players, adapt to what we’re seeing our players want,” says Van Wyck. “Part of that is [in how we build the game], but another part is the recruiting. How long does it take to ramp somebody up to be able to actually create assets that show up in your game?

At the end of the day, if we build the games that our players want to play, that’s how we’ll be successful,” explains Van Wyck. “That’s what should motivate what we build. That’s also what this structure has done – we want the people that are day-in-day-out making the games to be the ones to make the decisions on the games.”

The visual leap is undoubtedly a big one, though unsurprising considering what Ninja Theory managed to pull off with Unreal Engine 5 in Hellblade 2. Now, the question remains: How long will it be before we get a new Halo game? We’d wager not very, considering the team did confirm that they were working on multiple games in the series, and with Unreal Engine being more of a standardized engine that many studios already use, we expect we’ll see a new Halo game a lot sooner rather than later. 

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