A bit of game industry news for you: in a pretty big win for Epic Games and their Unreal Engine, 343 Industries rebrands to Halo Studios and said the future of Halo will be built on Unreal Engine 5.
“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters. 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.” — Pierre Hintze, Studio Head
They confirmed that they're working on "multiple projects" so we can expect a whole lot more Halo to come. Hopefully they will work well enough on Linux platforms with Valve's Proton.
Part of this is building Project Foundry, which is a research project for the studio to see what's required to build a Halo game in Unreal Engine and makes it a training tool for them. You can see more from that in the video below.
Direct Link
See more in the blog post.
Then again for 343 it just depends if they can make a good halo game, I've never really enjoyed their take on halo as much as the original series
Guess I can expect the next halo game to have shader stutter and/or traversal stutter then
But I haven't even bought Halo Infinite, so I don't think there's much chance of me playing this one...but still, it's nice to read news about Halo now and again.
Interesting to see they're now using the same engine as Installation 01.
That said, if 343's (bite me) track record is anything to go by, a move to a new engine can only lead to chaos in the short run, and likely just more chaos in the long run.
I'm not even a Halo fan, but this is getting grotesque.
Unreal 5 I guess might help with development time at least.
It's saddening to see more and more developers ditch their in-house engine for unreal engineThis will make it easier for them to port it over to Playstation if and when they do it because they've already released Grounded and Sea of Thieves on their platform. With the over $500 million dollars they spent to make Halo Infinite with their own engine, they probably saw the difficulties that people were having with maintaining and getting new people aboard to learn how to use and/or develop it.
From the many articles I've read about the game, there are many features to this day that players want but Halo Studios still hasn't delivered and seemed to priority something else instead like the upcoming 3rd person mode.
They couldn't even be bothered to use the Halo font from the last quarter century.
It really underscores how little they understand about Halo. It was a good run 117. RIP.
I'm beginning to think all beloved franchise are being destroyed intentionally to justify removing them from the culture pool forever and ostracizing the golden version of each franchise.
For example,: RIP Lord of the Rings -- Amazon & The Rings of Power are doing their best to kill Tolkein's legacy forevermore.
Halo 4’s switch to loadouts with drops for players doing well meant most matches turned into blowouts and the flow of the game was off. The story was goofy too.
Never even played 5, skipped that whole console generation.
MCC was a buggy disaster though a nice time now if you can find matches.
I put a lot of time into Infinite. The story ends on a sudden cliffhanger and even before then isn’t the best. Movement is frenetic, combat is unbalanced. Multiplayer is flat out annoying with weapon balance being very off. The community complained very loudly for years about the hammer damage only for 343 to buff the range extremely and break the weapon entirely. Maps have no flow and only the remakes of Bungies old maps play well.
I don’t trust 343 or Halo Studios to make a good game. This move is likely due to the ability to hire short term contractors easily, a trend we are seeing across a lot of studios these days.
I'm beginning to think all beloved franchise are being destroyed intentionally to justify removing them from the culture pool forever and ostracizing the golden version of each franchise.
For example,: RIP Lord of the Rings -- Amazon & The Rings of Power are doing their best to kill Tolkein's legacy forevermore.
Agreed. It's really sad to me to think there are likely young kids out there today who might have watched that amazon prime abomination of a show and think "so this is what lord of the rings is?" and have no clue about the actual magic and wonder of the books.
You know what? I can't even remember if I played 5 or not. If I did, it would have been a long Saturday at a friend's house, because I never owned it, and have not had an Xbox in years*.
*I purchased a used XbOne and Halo Infinite and extra controller a few years ago to later learn that you can't play split-screen. I was intending to play through the campaign with my cousin and then sell it all. I bought the system just for that game. I was appalled that they removed split-screen co-op campaign, a staple feature the entire series! Fortunately, I was able to resell and return everything I had purchased, and I only lost $20.
MCC was really great to replay on PC with higher resolution and keyboard and mouse... until it stopped working. I was in the middle of a campaign with a friend, and we simply couldn't continue.
It was those two points which wrote the series off for me. Long ago, I had completed the original Halo 1 campaign on Legendary solo as well as on Legendary with a friend. Just good memories at this point I suppose.
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