The artist formerly known as 343 Industries surprised the industry when they made an unexpected announcement Sunday evening during the Halo World Championship Finals. Firstly, the studio is not only making a full-on engine switch to Unreal Engine 5 for development but is also completely rebranding to Halo Studios.
The message sent was clear, this is a new beginning for the legendary franchise and a reset for the developer, after a rollercoaster decade-plus with 343 Industries at the helm.
The announcement video discussing this overhaul was laden with nostalgia, including pans to physical copies of the original trilogy with commentary about older Halo games – and what made them special.
What was shown in Unreal Engine was even more exciting, featuring clear call backs to Halo-of-old and even a few hints that a return to Combat Evolved may be in the plans.
Covenant Dance
While the news is exciting on the surface, it is easy to be skeptical considering the long and often painful journey this franchise has been on since ex-developers Bungie exited stage right.
Halo Infinite, the latest release in the franchise, was supposed to be the reset the series needed. When that game was initially announced, it was referred to by former Studio Head Chris Lee as a “spiritual reboot”; a focus on the future of the franchise while having roots in the past.
Halo Infinite – by any account – was a good game, but a lack of post-launch support and clear leadership issues seemingly doomed the release to be another cautionary tale of ‘live service game gone wrong’, and reporting after the fact shows that Infinite cut massive amounts of campaign content prior to launch to get the game out the door.
I think skepticism after everything that’s happened with the series is warranted, but I also think that Halo Studios should be treated as a genuine good-faith effort by Xbox to finally get this completely right and not just provide further lip service from a company that has made many mistakes with this sacred franchise.
There is reason for optimism and genuine belief that Xbox and Halo Studios are taking appropriate steps to make sure they don’t repeat the same mistakes, largely due to actions taken to change leadership and bring in new voices to lead the franchise into the future.
Break it down, build it back up
One of the most common misconceptions I’ve seen surrounding this announcement is that this studio rebranding is simply a name and engine change and not much more. While Halo Studios is being built on the bones of 343, it seems clear that this new team is nearly completely different than the team that made Halo 4, 5, The Master Chief Collection, or Halo Infinite.
Reporting and LinkedIn browsing tell us that the leadership that oversaw Halo for more than a decade is gone. Founder of 343 Bonnie Ross left in late 2022 and the leadership team below her left in droves quickly after. Longtime franchise creative director Frank O’Connor quietly left the studio in 2023, as well as Kiki Wolfkill, who had acted as an executive at 343 since 2008. Joseph Staten who came in to fix the mess that was Halo Infinite post Craig-face left 343 unceremoniously less than a year after joining the team. Other high profile departures include longtime multiplayer designer Tom French and lead art designer “Sparth”.
As someone who is coming at this from an outside perspective, it’s difficult to place blame on one individual person, but it’s clear there was a fundamental issue at the leadership level that caused massive issues for the entire run of 343 Industries.
New studio heads would come and go for each project, yet issues would plague each release, including but not limited to a lackluster and barren multiplayer mode in Halo 4 to one of the most bungled game releases of all time in The Master Chief Collection.
With this amount of failure at 343, a studio rebranding makes sense, not only to wipe away the image problem that 343 Industries provides but as a way to message to everyone that this is the start of a new era.
Studio Head Pierre Hintze says as much in an interview with Xbox Wire: “If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters. Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2 – 343 Industries. Now, I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. 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.”
I think Xbox knows that there have been many promises made about Halo and many times they haven’t delivered. I believe one of the reasons this was announced on a Sunday night during the Halo World Championship was to speak directly to the hardcore fan and perhaps extend an olive branch to lapsed players.
The thing that matters the most now is execution, and these games launching to great reception and sustained success is paramount for good will to be earned.
Halo fans just want to feel unapologetic excitement for the future of the franchise, and Halo Studios has a chance to completely change the narrative with their upcoming projects.
No more games launching without major features or a lack of post-launch support. No more one step forward and two steps back with releases. Xbox has to get it right this time.
Master Chonk.
Tough task ahead of them. I don’t see them accomplishing it if they remain stubborn to releasing a “feature complete” Halo Game. It’s just too big of an ask from a relatively small studio compared to COD’s of the worlds.
Yeah, a feature complete Halo is a pipedream at this point unless they massively scale up the dev teams and there is only one way I see that being sustainable….
They should probably completely separate the MP and forge from the singleplayer experience and determine early wether the want to bother with co-op.
A ‘feature complete’ Halo game I don’t feel is ever on the cards anymore. It’s too much to ask from such a relatively small team. They need to complete change what Halo is, fanbase be damned IMO.
It’s finally time for a Mass Effect style Halo RPG.
Actually they just need to figure out narratives and try and get that part right.
Objectively Halo infinite was a great campaign and ended up a great MP experience but gaming media and fanboys wanted to dunk on Halo and Xbox like we have seen all gen.
They just need to make sure and be on the correct side of the narrative next time.
Yeah, the Halo universe and lore is amazing but most of it is outside the games. It would be fantastic if someone could make it into a proper game.
Single player wise, I don’t think they need to drift that far way from what they did with Infinite
The gameplay was very fun, it was just too way barebones, if you’re going to have an open world like that you need to have way more variety in locations, missions types, big memorable spectacle moments etc Infinite kind of had none of that
MP wise, they absolutely need to make forge a huge, huge focus of the next game and it either needs to be there at launch or launch window and it needs to be very robust and well implemented for easy matchmaking/browsing that it can basically carry the game by itself
Infinite’s forge came far too late and the browser is complete garbage, that can’t happen again
My other hot take is that Halo needs to get crazier with the characters/skins, in the era of Fortnite you can’t rely on MTX that consist of Spartan with some different colours here and there, they need Doomslayer spartans and other IP crossovers whether the old Halo fanbase likes it or not
and finally, and kind of related to the last point, stop caring what old Halo fans want, they are too small a base to care about anymore, it’s time to try new things
They did that with Halo 4 and all the toxic Halo “fans” shat on everything 343i put out… as an actual day zero fan, that lot (the “fans”) and the damage they’ve done disgust me.
Halo 4 brought in so much of that outside lore and so many of the community were too dumb to want to follow a more elaborate plot line.
Halo has to be the most untapped, underutilized, mismanaged IP in the history of game properties. Hearing there’s a refocus with multiple games in development makes me excited.