True. Call of Duty still uses lots of components from 20+ year-old Quake 2 engine. And it serves its purpose just fine. My point was that Slipspace is not really and "old engine" and it's not the main problem with it. The problem with Slipspace is that making game engine just for one game doesn't work in today's world. Microsoft should either invested in it not just for Halo but for other games as well or shouldn't have invested at all.

What about using id tech? Also, having id tech compete with unreal? I really don't understand why they don't push it more both internally and externally.

It could also be a meh engine Tbf. It took Bungie two huge overhauls to update Blam! to something not trash. I mean, Infinite looks good and runs well but that's only half the story, we don't know how it is to work with but based on recent rumours, it's still a bit of a nightmare. I bet they were planning on doing deeper overhauls to it but time caught up to them and they've not done anywhere near as many updates as planned.

It's also a fucking nightmare with Microsoft's shitty contractor policy and having to hire people, then spend months teaching them about Slipspace, then losing them, is really counterproductive, whereas you switch to Unreal Engine and everyone in the industry knows that. Slipspace has often been pointed at as a large problem for 343 for various reasons, not because it's "old" but because it's still an archaic engine with little documentation and massively interrupts onboarding new hires.

They could have invested in it for other games but every Xbox studio now is on Unreal Engine pretty much, it's just a lot simpler and easier.

Ok, I see your point and I actually agree.  I really do believe there is still a great story to complete and I would lAove for MC to go out with the bang he deserve.  I also know how new studios and people want to carve out their own destiny and show that one, they can stay true to the lore but also really bring something new to and established series.  I always like for creative teams not to be to limited in how they go about creating a game because many times when a team says we cannot do this or that, they just make a game who direction is never fullfilling because its in between 2 different states. The majority of times the game neither make new fans happy nor the current base and just fail.

As for remakes, I have never bought one.  Once I play a game I just do not have a lot of interesting in revisiting it again just because it received a new coat of paint.

I'd not be surprised if we even see Ubisoft eventually dump all their internal engines and move over to Unreal Engine, if someone acquires Ubisoft then sadly one of the easiest layoff and cost-saving measures will be to dump all the dozens of engine teams, dump the engines themselves and move over to Unreal Engine. Could probably shave off hundreds of employees from that alone.

And it'll also be beneficial to moving Ubisoft like other publishers, that is, laying off thousands and instead of developing everything in-house they like other publishers start using cheap outsourcing, using cheap outsourcing is a lot easier when the external developer doesn't have to learn an entirely new engine they've never worked with before.

We're just going to see more and more proprietary engines die (at least in the AAA space) as Unreal Engine becomes stronger and stronger.

Dont' have the knowhow but ID tech had issues in the past, Doom 3 was going to be the ID tech pusher but only a handfull of third party games end up using it, I think the original Prey did.

Genshin Impact on xbox sounds good but their is this whole history about it,  Xbox approached MiHoYo first but did not reached an agreement and then Sony stepped in gave them better value (as in cash) + dev support. Also probably why it is not on switch (but is somehow possible on android phones? hmm)..

We had the rumours a few years ago that MS was trying to make a deal for Honkai but again offering seemed to be low...

+4 years later Genshin is coming but if you enjoy it so much and you want to play Honkai on a console or their zenless zone zero that they just released you have to get a PS5 or wait till it come to Xbox...

I would love to see id Tech much heavily more utilized, and I was hoping it would, but it's primarily a linear, FPS only game engine. It's never really been used for anything else. But also, id Software is not a large studio. They would have to hire a lot of engineers to be able to properly support the engine across a lot of studios and teams.

Whereas Unreal Engine, it's insanely easy to find engineers that know how to work in the engine and Xbox was already investing heavily in the engine. Undead Labs even has a dedicated tech studio that only assists with UE. Then you have The Coalition, a studio that even assisted Epic in developing the engine. So there's already a huge number of experts within Xbox on UE, unlike id Tech, that has been proprietary for the past 15 years now that you can't simply undue. 

There's also the case of utilities that are unknowns. My 2 biggest concerns when it comes to Halo in UE5 is Forge and Halo's in-game physics. We haven't seen anything like what Halo offers in id Tech before. So it would, again, take a huge investment of time and resources to be able to modify id Tech to cater to Halo. Something that just isn't necessary when they have a ton of UE experts right there at their disposal. 

And Retro has used the Rude Engine since Gamecube which is based on Unreal 2. Prime Remastered. DK Tropical Freeze and Prime 1 Gamecube all on the Rude Engine. In the right hands old tools can still serve well. No denying new engines can offer more. RGG switching to Dragon Engine was a godsend for the gameplay and exploration of Yakuza games.

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?”

@Poll, Yes.

First of all, that Unreal Engine footage looked beautiful, although it still has the shiny/clean look that Unreal Engine tends to have, I hope they tone that down just a tad and make it more dirty and gritty but otherwise, it looked stunning and it still looks like Halo. Also a plus that they've seemingly kept for the most part, the Halo Infinite art style.

Pierre seems focused on all the right things, it's not just the engine changes but how he speaks about him changing the studios culture, workflow, how the teams are organized, etc. Talking about improving the efficiency of development beyond just an engine change, how they make Halo games, acknowledging that gamers want their content out faster nowadays and them needing to react to that. These things are in Pierre's wheelhouse too as he was a Producer or Production Lead for most of his career.

Talking about it being a new chapter, a fresh start, focused on growing and expanding the Halo world.

My primary concern with Unreal Engine is the "feel" of Halo but I've also read in the past from developers themselves that engine has absolutely nothing to do with the "feel" of a videogame, I don't know shit so I don't know if my concerns are unwarranted. That being said, Pierre specifically notes and makes heavy emphasis on the importance of it needing to still feel and sound like Halo. It shows to me how seriously they take that concern which alleviates my concerns, it shows that they wouldn't make this change if it doesn't feel like Halo still.

Pierre's "do more, say less" approach works for me.

Halo games (plural) in development is awesome, and they're all on Unreal Engine, so I wonder if they're all AAA releases? It was great to hear that Pierre has recalibrated the studio to enable them to work on multiple projects at once. Previously it was just like, a mainline Halo team then a tiny publishing team (which Pierre was apart of) working with multiple external studios. Previously it felt like 343i was set up a bit messy, you had a Campaign team separated from the Multiplayer team, a Publishing team separated from everyone else.

Pierre genuinely seems grateful to be there and understands how big of a responsibility he has to the studio and to the fans.

I don't like the logo, Lol. At a quick glance it's too unclear but I don't give a fuck about the logo, Lol. The name itself is eh, it would be cooler if it was called "Halo Studios" and they actually had more than one studio, Lol. Otherwise it's a generic name but it's probably better than 343 Industries at this point in time just because of the baggage that name carries, always found it funny that 343 named themselves after a character who to videogame only players, was a psychopath bastard robot though, Lmao.

It is a bit sad to see Slipspace go Tbh and I'm no fan of Unreal Engine slowly monopolising the AAA engine market but it's not really arguable that this is for the best, multiple benefits and very few cons that I can think of.

1. They no longer need a large portion of their staff working solely on an engine in their only damn studio in Redmond, it's a distraction which takes funding and resources away from the rest of the studio that actually makes the games. They can focus solely on making the videogames now and can now set up multiple teams and create different games simultaneously in their single studio.

2. Slipspace still used BLAM! as a base, some of it is still outdated as fuck by almost 25 years. They have more things available to them in Unreal Engine which would have taken years to replicate in Slipspace and a huge amount of resources. Bungie went through the same issues as 343i when they tried to overhaul BLAM with Tiger Engine but it was well known a disaster for Destiny 1 development, they overhauled it once again for Destiny 2 and I don't know if they got things right this time but 343 opted to instead skip a 2nd massive overhaul and jump to Unreal Engine.

Neither side is "right" over the other here, but it shows that attempting to overhaul BLAM was a disaster for Bungie too, even if they may have got it right the 2nd time around, there's nothing wrong with 343i instead going "yeah, fuck that, lets try Unreal Engine instead" which to be quite honest would probably be even less work than overhauling Slipspace for a 2nd time.

3. Every developer in the industry knows Unreal Engine, instead of spending months learning how to use Slipspace before they can even get started, they can jump right in. This is especially important with Microsoft's shitty contract policy which is never going but seemingly only applies to fully integrated studios like 343i and Turn 10. This contractor policy is a nightmare for proprietary engines. You hire someone on contract, have to spend months teaching them Slipspace and then months later they're gone and they can't be rehired.

Having internal engines doesn't really gel well with this shitty contract policy, Turn 10 only seemingly gets away with it because they also have the equally large Playground Games co-developing everything with them on the same engine but 343 doesn't have that. Having said that, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Fable 2 swaps to Unreal Engine, I bet it has been a bit difficult for Playground to hire. Although, the contract policy won't apply to Playground being a British studio and also a limited integrated one.

4. Talent sharing, information sharing, between Xbox Studios, since almost all of them are on Unreal Engine now they can provide a lot of help and assistance to each other, they can help each other improve each others games, teach them better Unreal Engine techniques and they have one of the best Unreal Engine developers in the industry in The Coalition.

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Pretty much all those rumours about Slipspace being a major problem were confirmed true by this interview.

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• Was worried about Forge before I saw Fortnite UGC and now I'm no longer worried.
• Was worried about the feel but Pierre banging on about how important that is has alleviated my concerns.
• Other concerns are not about Halo itself but the wider industry (Unreal Engine's slow monopoly) so irrelevant to the point of Halo.

Pierre is saying all the right things, it seems like in these 2 years he has streamlined the studio, made a lot of internal changes and also switched them to Unreal Engine whilst supporting Halo Infinite. He sounds like he has a plan and that makes me confident because Pierre seems on the ball, even despite being slapped with layoffs and a messy team/videogame.

I've kind of not even thought about Halo lately, busy with other games, but I have the excitement brewing inside me once again. Now Pierre's going to go quiet again until he has something worth speaking about, I say let the man cook.