343 Industries becomes Halo Studios, confirms switch to Unreal Engine: 'The original Halo franchise was a graphics showcase, it was best-in-class… and that's what Halo needs to be again'

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Earlier this year it was reported that 343 Industries was planning to switch from the Slipspace to the Unreal Engine, though Microsoft did not confirm the report. Now it's official. With the six-and-a-half-minute mash note to Unreal embedded above, 343 Industries has left behind Slipspace as well as the name 343 Industries, officially rebranding as Halo Studios for future projects.

The aging code of Slipspace was apparently a problem during the creation of Halo Infinite, and the developers are bullish on Unreal's improvements. "Halo Infinite was the last remnants of how we made Halo games in the past," says VP and studio head Pierre Hintze. "That was our recipe and what we're doing now, we're changing the recipe."

The possibilities are showcased in three landscapes created as part of Project Foundry, a research project lead FX artist Daniel Henley calls "an effort to show ourselves how far we can push things using Unreal 5." He goes on to say, "The original Halo franchise was a graphics showcase, it was best-in-class. That's what Halo was when it first was released and that's what Halo needs to be again."

The aforementioned report also claimed that at least 95 staff had been laid off, and that there had been conflict in the studio between those who wanted to jump to Unreal and those happy to stay with Slipspace. Now that things have been settled, the newly dubbed Halo Studios is hiring again, with positions for a creative director, lead game systems designer, senior technical designer, hard surface artist, technical artist, and senior UX designer all currently advertised on Microsoft's careers site.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.