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Microsoft's Phil Spencer says that Halo 4 will be powered by existing technology, with "a ton of work" by 343 industries

Halo 4 and Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary were unveiled at E3 - the latter will run on three engines, including the original code and the Halo: Reach tech for multiplayer. But what about next year's Halo 4? 

"343 obviously has partnered closely with Bungie for a while," Microsoft Game Studios corporate VP Spencer said. "We had been working with them on Halo: Reach and map packs. We started with the code base from Halo, so it's not something we had to re-roll from the beginning. [Chief Technology Officer] David Wu and the team behind the core engine tech inside of 343 have done a lot of work."

Halo: Reach wowed gamers with an impressive engine, and Halo 4 will continue to play to its strengths added Spencer. "Halo has always been a unique game with huge outdoor environments but also playing indoor environments at the same time. The technology base isn't 100 percent new, but a ton of work has gone into it by 343."

Halo 4 is due out in 2012, while Halo Anniversary will mark the ten year anniversary of Halo: Combat Evolved to the day by launching on 15 November.

http://xbox-360.nowgamer.com/news/6303/halo-4-engine-isnt-100-per-cent-new-microsoft

I'd rather have them improve a good existing engine than build a new one that needs tweaking... that is a good news.... getting more out of the old one...

It would be nice to see a new game engine

Not surprised, it'll only be used for one game.

Well be rest assured, I think MS will want Halo 5 to be the first 720 Halo title, not some off shot, they'll want full impact like Halo 3, and that won't come till 2015. So you may get another Halo after Halo 4 on 360, but 720 it's unlikely.

Even then I doubt we'll see another Halo on 360 on the launch of 720 ...

I think Halo 4 will be last halo on 360, and Halo 5 will be first halo on 720.


edit - Actually scratch that, 360 might get a small side story in like 2014, something ODST like, depending on how MS want to handle future support for the 360 after 720 releases.

Yeah pretty much this.  And its the right way to go.

They can just heavily modify the Reach engine and tweak it to improve visuals and such quite a bit in much less time and with much less money than building an entire new engine from the ground up.  Plus I highly doubt we'll see the second installment of the new Halo trilogy on the 360, it'll be a launch title for the Nextbox and have an entirely new dedicated engine for it.

And Reach was already pretty beautiful so just improving on that engine alone is fine with me until next gen.

Reach is quite underrated visually so if they can take that and improve it, it will be amazing.

Not many games on the 360 look good when I blow them up on my 1080p projector and 92 inch screen. Like Crysis 2 even looks quite bad and pixelated on the 360. Alan wake looks terrible...

But Halo Reach actually looks respectable when you consider all it is rendering and the draw distances at hand...

Halo Reach was an impressive engine? I liked the more colourfull engine.

More color? we are talking about a game which has pink aliens driving pink vehicles.

I just played the reach demo, pretty colors but pretty basic stuff on screen compared to current games. It does look nice and clean though.

I play on the same setup, have you tried setting the 360 to 720p output? I've found that that increased the sharpness of the graphics considerably for Alan Wake. My projector has a much better upscaler then the 360. Even the dashboard looks better with 720p output instead of 1080p. (I have an old fat 360 one of the first with hdmi, maybe the upscaler in the old model just sucks)