One of the biggest Xbox announcements of 2024 came on Sunday evening when, during the Halo World Championship 2024 esports event, Halo developer 343 Industries announced a rebrand to "Halo Studios" and a shift to Unreal Engine 5 — sunsetting the Slipspace Engine the studio built for 2021's Halo Infinite. Shortly afterward, it was confirmed that all future Halo games will be built on Epic Games' tech stack, and that it's already being used as the foundation for multiple projects in active development.
The news was delivered in a seven-minute long studio update trailer the developers labelled "A New Dawn," in which various members of the Halo Studios team presented Project Foundry — a tech demo built internally to showcase what many of Halo's classic designs and environments might look like in an Unreal Engine 5 game. What has me truly happy about this switch, though, aren't pretty graphics; instead, it's the stated goal of helping "the team focus on making games, versus making the tools and the engines."
