Today’s announcements by the newly-rebranded Halo Studios – formerly 343 Industries – that multiple new Halo games are in development has excited fans of Microsoft’s flagship Xbox franchise. But is there cause for celebration for PlayStation 5 owners too?
Halo Studios has said it will now develop all future Halo projects using Unreal Engine 5, the Epic Games-made toolkit for game development that’s used widely across the industry. It’s set to power the next Witcher and Tomb Raider installments, and can be seen in action this week within the highly-acclaimed Silent Hill 2 remake.
Discussing the move to Unreal Engine, Halo Studios said the change means faster, smoother development and iteration is now possible, while it will also allow for an easier onboarding of new team members who know the toolkit already. On top of this, though, it potentially means easier multiplatform development is now possible – should Microsoft look to extend its cross-platform release program and launch Halo on other consoles.
“From a multi-platform game development perspective, moving to Unreal Engine 5 would certainly be easier for the developer than porting across the existing Slipspace engine,” Digital Foundry boss Rich Leadbetter told me this morning.
“It stands to reason that an engine designed for deployment across multiple platforms would be easier to work with than existing technology built for Xbox and PC.”
Xbox is yet to release games from any of its biggest franchises – Halo, Forza, Gears of War – on PlayStation or Switch hardware, but multiple reports have suggested Microsoft is at least seriously considering the option for future installments of its biggest brands, and the direction of trend seems clear.