Posting some snippets from the interview that I liked before I respond to the poll.
"Alongside the engine change, the studio is seeing changes in culture, workflow, and how its teams are organized." "So we’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games. So, we start a new chapter today." “We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed – the expectations of how fast their content is available,” "As gaming evolves, and players increasingly point out how long it takes to see new games from their favourite series, the team at Halo Studios felt the need to react."
“One of the primary things we’re interested in is growing and expanding our world so players have more to interact with and more to experience.
The team had to be sure that the first Halo games to come out of a non-Slipspace engine would look, feel, and sound right.
“Everything we’ve made is built to the kind of standards that we need to build for the future of our games. Hintze goes further: “It’s fair to say that our intent is that the majority of what we showcased in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects.”
Halo began its life as a graphical showcase for the original Xbox – the goal is to make that so again.
Of course, the soul of Halo isn’t just in how it looks, but how it feels – the intrinsic dance of its combat, the thud of the weapons, and the sense that you’re inhabiting the Master Chief’s armor. While Foundry may be a primarily visual project, Halo Studios is deeply invested in retaining the essence of what players love about Halo:
“The spirit of Halo is more than just the visuals,” agrees Matthews. “It’s the lore. It’s the physics. Playing as the Chief, you’re this huge tank of a soldier – it’s the way that he moves, he feels. We’re all really obsessed about what our players love about Halo. We’re constantly listening to this feedback – and that’s at the core of any initiative like Foundry, or any intention that the studio has about how we move forwards.”
“We’re thinking about the intangibles,” Hintze adds. “The interaction with the Master Chief, or your Spartan, or the enemies. We are very careful about the decisions we’re making in that space – down to the precision and authenticity of the weapons, the authenticity of the animations. There are a list of nuances which we use to verify that we’re on track.”
“One of the things I really wanted to get away from was the continued teasing out of possibilities and ‘must-haves’. We should do more and say less. For me, I really think it is important that we continue the posture which we have right now when it comes to our franchise – the level of humility, the level of servitude towards Halo fans.
What is clear is that, yes, it’s Halo games – plural – in development right now. Where Halo Infinite saw practically the entire studio focused on a single, evolving project, Halo Studios has recalibrated:
“You asked why we consider this as a new chapter,” says Hintze. “We want a singular focus. Everyone is in this place is here to make the best possible Halo games.”
Why Switch Engine?
"Previously, 343 Industries needed a large portion of its staff simply to develop and upkeep the engine its games ran on."
“The way we made Halo games before doesn’t necessarily work as well for the way we want to make games for the future. So part of the conversation we had was about how we help the team focus on making games, versus making the tools and the engines.” Adopting Unreal means Halo Studios is more able to create games with a focus that can satisfy fans – even setting up multiple teams to create different games simultaneously.
Unreal also comes with in-built benefits that would have taken years of work to replicate with Slipspace: “Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” There are aspects of Unreal that Epic has been developing for some time, which are unavailable to us in Slipspace – and would have taken huge amounts of time and resources to try and replicate.
"There’s another in-built benefit – Unreal is familiar to huge parts of the wider gaming industry. Where developers would have to spend time learning how to use Slipspace when joining 343, Halo Studios’ adoption of the industry-leading engine makes it a far smoother process to bring in new talent" "With the move to Unreal, the on-ramp is shorter, the experience is there, and the series can grow far more quickly and organically than ever before."
“It’s not just about how long it takes to bring a game to market, but how long it takes for us to update the game, bring new content to players, adapt to what we’re seeing our players want,” “Part of that is [in how we build the game], but another part is the recruiting. How long does it take to ramp somebody up to be able to actually create assets that show up in your game?”
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 08 October 2024
