343 is switching to Unreal Engine for future Halo games

Over the last couple of years, 343 Industries' struggles with the Halo IP reached a boiling point, resulting in a round of layoffs at the studio this year. At this point, many of those in leadership positions during Halo Infinite's development have moved on and just under 100 employees have been let go. The studio will continue to be in charge of Halo, but its future is now uncertain. 

While Halo Infinite was supposed to be a ‘new starting point' for the franchise, ushering in ‘the next ten years of Halo', 343 seems to now be cutting its losses and moving on to new projects. According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, 343 is now starting over again with a shift over to Unreal Engine.

While Halo Infinite was initially announced as using a new, purpose-built engine called ‘Slipspace', this set of tools was essentially a heavily modified version of the legacy Halo engine, which led to a lot of issues during development, ultimately resulting in costly delays to the game. Moving forward, the report claims that future Halo games will be developed with Unreal Engine instead, starting off with an upcoming Battle Royale spin-off codenamed ‘Tatanka'.

We've heard of Tatanka before, but it was previously billed as a Battle Royale mode for Halo Infinite. This new report suggests that Tatanka will actually be a separate entity, although it is still being co-developed with Certain Affinity. Apparently, the decision to move over to Unreal Engine was made in late 2022, ahead of January's studio cuts.

If you were still hoping for new Halo Infinite campaign content, then there is more bad news on that front. The report goes on to confirm that the campaign team has essentially been gutted and while previous messaging from 343 had led fans to believe that campaign expansions could be on the horizon, no additional single-player content for Infinite was ever actively in the works.

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KitGuru Says: I was a huge fan of Halo Infinite's campaign and the ending had me looking forward to future content. Unfortunately, the lingering questions left over from that game may never be answered, as it seems Halo is heading towards another soft reboot. 

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