Halo developer 343 Industries has lost at least 95 people due to recent layoffs at Microsoft, and the studio is switching from its proprietary Slipspace engine to Epic Games’ Unreal engine for future games, Bloomberg reports.
The future of Halo has been somewhat up in the air since layoffs were announced on Jan. 18. Halo: Infinite launched strongly at the end of 2021, but as time went on, players became frustrated with the progress of the multiplayer, with planned features such as online campaign co-op and Forge (which finally launched in November) repeatedly delayed, and no sign of new campaign content on the horizon.
The 343 had issued a statement to continue developing the Halo game after the layoffs. on January 21, the studio’s head Pierre Hintze tweeted from his Halo account, saying, “Halo and Sergeant Major are here to stay. 343 Industries continues to develop Halo now and in the future. including the epic story, multiplayer, and more of the things that make Halo great.” And Matt Boody, who heads up Xbox Game Studios, said in an interview with Bloomberg, “343 will continue as the in-house developer of Halo and as the home of Halo.”
But it’s unclear when we’ll see the next game in the series, so it’s hard to know exactly how involved 343 will be with the series in the future. For example, the studio has partnered with Austin-based Certain Affinity on a combat game codenamed Tatanka, but that game “could go in a different direction.
Bloomberg says that Tatanka will apparently also be developed on the Unreal engine, and that future Halo games “will also explore using” the Unreal engine. If true, the change marks another major game developer moving to the Unreal engine, with “The Witcher” and “Cyberpunk” developer CD Projekt Red announcing in March a “multi-year strategic partnership” with Epic Games to use the Unreal engine, and in November, Epic In November, Epic said more than half of all announced next-gen games would be made in the Unreal engine.
343 is also apparently not working on new story content for Halo: Infinite, which seems ironic for a game that was once called “the beginning of the next decade for Halo” and named “Infinite. Instead, the developers are “working on prototypes in the Unreal Engine and coming up with ideas for a new Halo game.
