343 Industries rebrands to Halo Studios, picks Unreal Engine to help revitalize the franchise

343 Industries is changing its name to Halo Studios as part of a larger "new dawn" for itself and the flagging Xbox franchise.

On Sunday, the Halo Infinite developer revealed it would switch from its in-house Slipspace engine to Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5 for multiple projects in development for the series.

Per studio head Pierre Hintze, the name and engine change will both improve development efficiency and "change the recipe of how we make Halo games."

The shift to Unreal was previously reported in January 2023, a decision made because Slipspace was "the source of headaches" during Infinite's development. Hintze acknowledged the engine's issues, saying it required the team to develop games and a tech stack stack simultaneously while making Infinite.

With Unreal, the goal is to use it to "create games with a focus that can satisfy fans," and establish teams to develop several games at once, a noted difference from how the franchise has historically been handled.

"The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future," said Halo Studios' COO Elizabeth van Wyck.

Halo's great journey to Unreal

Several triple-A developers have embraced Unreal after previously working so long with proprietary engines. To date, the list of big Unreal-using studios includes CD Projekt Red, BioWare, and Romero Games.

As Kotaku's Ethan Gach noted, most of Xbox's first-party studios have moved over to Unreal for their immediate next project.

To fully prepare for making a Halo game in Unreal, the studioworked on a research project dubbed "Project Foundry," which van Wyck said helped the team "educate and understand what our capability is...and know we're on the right path."

If everything goes to plan, Hintze said "the majority of what we showcased in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects."

Amidst all of this, Halo Infinite is still receiving post-launch support, such as an upcoming third-person mode announced over the weekend.

Halo Infinite had an infamously tumultuous launch and first year cycle that took time for 343 to recover from. Following mass layoffs from Microsoft at the start of 2023, many ex-staff claimed the game had been mismanaged by Xbox leadership, and the studio's future with Halo was called into question.

With the new name and engine shift, Halo Studios says it has "recalibrated" so "the people that are day-in-day-out making the games [get] to be the ones to make the decisions on the games," said van Wyck.

"We want a singular focus," continued Hintze. "Everyone is in this place is here to make the best possible Halo games."

Xbox's full blog on Halo Studios, Unreal Engine 5, and "Project Foundry" can be read here.