Unlike Most, I Find It Impossible To Remain Optimistic About Halo's Future Even After The Recent News

A Summary Of The Halo News Thus Far

Halo is back in the news, and for once, it isn't a droning loud dismay about the state of Halo Infinite. Instead, the news about the future of Halo and its primary studio, 343 Industries, involved a flurry of announcements that took most, myself included, by surprise. First, 343 Industries is changing its name to Halo Studios, and to show how much Halo will be at the center of the studio moving forward, they said they were "working on multiple games." What that means is anyone's guess, but I don't think it means that everything is being led entirely by this newly formed Halo Studios. Collaborations with third parties, such as what 343 Industries did with Halo Wars 2, are not off the table. Then, after the new branding change was revealed, the most significant announcement was made. All projects by Halo Studios will exclusively use Unreal Engine, and Halo's custom engine, the Slipspace Engine, will be retired. In an attempt to explain this shocking technological pivot, art director Chris Matthews explained how the Slipspace Engine had components dating back to early prototypes of Halo: Combat Evolved and were almost twenty-five years old.

While the details on what exactly some of these projects would involve were scarce, it is essential to note that this news operated under a rarely reported backdrop. This news and its accompanying trailer were announced ahead of the Halo World Championship grand finals. While Infinite has struggled to maintain its online multiplayer community, the lights are still on with its eSports ventures. Halo Studios knows that anything they have that might rock the boat must be presented to the multiplayer crowd first. God willing, maybe the single-player community will follow afterward. While I don't think this means the next mainline Halo game won't have a single-player campaign, it's hard not to look at how Microsoft and Xbox are drumming up excitement for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and fail to realize they are copying its hype cycle with Halo. But it's still a hype cycle. This video is smoke and mirrors for all I care until we see more about what is planned for the rumored games. A flashy trailer with what is a tech demo of Master Chief battling a big baddie in Unreal doesn't magically make me forget recurring reports of structural mismanagement or what I perceive as an identity crisis facing the state of Halo single-player campaigns.

That twinge of cynicism in those last few sentences returns me to the premise laid out in the title of this essay. While I remain skeptical of this recent news representing anything actionably positive about the Halo series, others have sounded opposite sentiments. Diehard fans are rattling sabers that the upcoming games are projects they have been dreaming about, and over on Windows Central, Brendan Lowry penned an essay that is the counterpoint to the one I will be making here. I recommend reading that work because I find it reasonably written and has arrived at a conclusion I can't deny one could logically reach. However, as someone who has been following 343 Industries' mainline Halo works and multiplayer contributions since the beginning, I need more than a sizzle reel to give Halo Studios the benefit of the doubt. If you want me back, you'll have to clarify if I do or do not need to prepare for another narrative soft reboot. After cycling through three antagonistic figures that each felt like they could have justified a trilogy, I'm not jumping for joy when you rattle off an obscure faction from an Eric Nylund book anymore. It would be best if you showed me what direction the single-player campaign design is going to be, be it more open-world stuff or a return to carefully crafted combat arenas. I need more than what has been shown because shit has been bad for outright four years now, and I have no goodwill to give.

An Engine Switch Won't Solve 343/Halo Studio's Struggles On Where To Take The Single-Player Campaign Design

It's hard to act all that impressed by the news Halo is switching to Unreal, considering it has been rumored for over a year. When IGN and The Verge first reported on Microsoft's massive employee cuts in 2023, both surmised that 343 was switching to Unreal as a cost-cutting measure and also one of self-preservation. With fewer warm bodies, operating and designing a custom game engine was becoming a losing proposition and one that the remaining staff at 343 couldn't justify anymore with shifting priorities towards new projects. I mean, Jesus, 343 lost 95 people in January of 2023, and even Certain Affinity, a collection of ex-Bungie employees that assisted Infinite's multiplayer development, announced layoffs in Spring 2024 for the first time in its 17-year history after contacts with 343 dried up. Is Halo a perfect one-to-one fit for Unreal Engine? No, but no game is a one-to-one fit for any given game engine. Still, the time and effort to get a new Halo running on Unreal likely is probably less than what it would have been to get another revision of the Slipspace Engine workable to whatever is planned for these multiple projects. And what's to say all of these games are first-person shooters? Unreal Engine can wear many hats, but the Slipspace Engine definitely can't.

As someone who still cannot thoroughly shake off their nostalgia and love for Halo entirely, I have to concede that switching to Unreal Engine is the right call. However, I would counter that it was the only call to make regarding game engines and the most straightforward decision facing the newly christened Halo Studios. Listening to the smattering of interviews on why this is happening also makes me slightly worried that the Slipstream Engine is being used as a partial scapegoat. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to deny the half-a-dozen internal reports that 343 had a tough time getting the Slipstream Engine to cooperate with their semi-open-world campaign aspirations and that it was one of the culprits to their struggles to deliver on multiplayer content and features in Halo Infinite. Nonetheless, the Slipstream Engine isn't entirely to blame for all of those struggles as well. When Patrick Wren and others were laid off in 2023, they blamed management for constantly setting unrealistic design goals from the onset of Infinite's conception. Was the Slipstream Engine a reason Infinite's campaign felt half-baked or a weird amalgam of open-world and arena-based game design? Sure, but that's on management not appreciating that the technology they spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours building wasn't suited for what they wanted.

As a thought experiment, let's pretend for a minute that Halo Infinite started on Unreal. Would that have guaranteed that navigating the game's world was not primarily aimless and empty? Was Unreal going to stop most combat scenarios from being copy-paste jobs we have seen since 343 took over from Bungie? We still have a bunch of bridges where the enemies are on one side, and you are on the other, and the mission is to get to the other side. Is Unreal preventing the pacing at the end of the game from being a complete mess that cannot decide what it wants to be? Those are not problems that can be thoroughly blamed on a game engine, and what's more, Halo Studios will need to pick up those pieces and figure out which ones they want to carry and which ones they are going to discard, and that's no easy task. With Halo Infinite, you got the sense that 343 wanted to jump in on the growing ubiquity of open-world shooty-shoot game design with Destiny and the works of Ubisoft drawing more attention than their previous two Halo works. However, for reasons we may never know, they pulled their punches. They went back to the standard Halo combat arena formula despite the foundation of their new game world in Infinite being a terrible fit for that. So, are we fully committing to those early open-world aspirations, or are we going back to the formula? Since Infinite's release, the market has changed, and not even Ubisoft's template is lighting up the world. Still, Halo will need to do something dramatic if it wants to return to self-contained combat boxes now that the reboot Doom games have set the standard on how they should play and feel. Unreal might make going in one direction or the other easier, but that's still ignoring the fact that Halo Studios needs to pick a direction to go in and commit to it.

So, This News Means We're Getting Another Story Soft Reboot, Right? And What About The Direction Of The Multiplayer?

I'm just going to lay out my cards. I have given up on the idea that Halo will ever have a fully committed or cohesive narrative that spans more than one game. Halo 4 burned through the Prometheans even though they could have warranted a trilogy of games; Halo 5 wasted whatever potential Catherine Halsey had as a recurring antagonist; Infinite's evil Cortana shit was downright terrible. I don't know what to tell you; I have zero confidence that any rebranded studio will be able to navigate this mess that is the current Halo universe. Now, I can hear some of you snickering in the background that caring about Halo canon is a fool's errand, and Halo's story has never been a primary driver of interest to the franchise. Those are fair points, but looking at how badly things stand with 343's habit of soft-rebooting things whenever they face even the slightest bit of pushback on their creative decisions is downright shocking. When people started to say they disliked the Promethean guns or that they thought the Didact deserved better after 343 hyped him up as a figure to help the series pivot in a new direction, 343 moved on to a new game and worked from scratch with a new centralizing figure. A centralizing figure they then discarded as they transitioned to a different one in the next game. And now they want to tell me they are working on multiple Halo projects. Yeah, I don't trust that being a bright future at all!

It is genuinely telling that a few months back, Microsoft admitted that Halo had grossed over $6 billion, and a third came from merchandise and non-gaming media. I don't think Halo is at risk of falling into the "Mickey Mouse Conundrum" wherein Master Chief's mainstream ubiquity is maintained outside of the medium he started in. Still, there's no denying that the franchise persists despite the community associated with it being primarily dissatisfied with the last end product or endless roadmaps to nowhere. Check out our forums and look at all of the times Gamer_152 has reported on dozens of occasions wherein 343 overpromised and underdelivered. If you want comprehensive coverage on the lamentable state of Halo Infinite's multiplayer content promises rarely coming to fruition, seriously, read any of @gamer_152's posts on the site! 343's management couldn't maintain a consistent direction or improvement plan for one game's multiplayer feature set for three years! Also, notice how the vast majority of what 343 committed to improving with Infinite was multiplayer-focused, despite the entire community loudly rejecting what they did with the single-player campaign. So, big whoop that they figured out how to make Halo a third-person shooter in Infinite. 343, and yes, this is a series tradition, never tried out new single-player campaign mechanics through DLC or traditional expansion packs. At best, the campaign co-op made a thankful return a solid year after the game launched.

And which mechanics from the past three games will Halo Studios codify with their following projects? You could list the one-off mechanics and gameplay gimmicks from Halo 4 to Infinite, and it would be at least two pages on a Google Doc. From Halo 5 to Infinite alone, 343 walked back over a half-dozen single-player and multiplayer mechanics. In Infinite's campaign, you didn't have squad mechanics or multiple playable protagonists. They ditched several Spartan Abilities in favor of a return to Halo 4's Equipment system. Then they canned the Warzone game mode, Requisition system, and loot box-based in-game monetization. Whatever the next Halo game might be, it will be a reboot, which isn't a problem. With how often 343 backtracked its direction and systems with its previous three games, you need a hard reset to determine what you want to center the new game projects on. I'm not going to stoke histrionics and suggest that Halo doesn't have a thematic or gameplay identity, but shit is murky. Halo Studios will have to develop a design document on what three or four recurring motifs or mechanics they want to emphasize to avoid the mental exhaustion fans have felt every time things completely pivoted over the last twenty years. Yet, some people want to say to me I'm the weirdo for thinking none of this shit is going to work? Come on, now!

That's why I'm spending most of my time belaboring grievances about the state of Halo's story and campaign. Even if you exclusively play Halo's multiplayer, history has shown that whatever 343, and now Halo Studios, does in its campaigns has a trickle-down impact on the multiplayer. And their historical lack of confidence in maintaining experimentation is more frustrating on the multiplayer front. Infinite is the best Halo has felt online for years. Likewise, I will lose my mind if we ever see a return to Halo 5, wherein your online performance is held by whatever Spartan Abilities you load into your character. Fans like dual-wielding, but it was always a headache due to balance issues. Nonetheless, there was no excuse for King of the Hill not to be a playable match type at launch with Infinite. Furthermore, what style of vaulting, jet-packing, or grappling are we getting in the future? That is entirely different every single time with each new game, and it's driving me up the wall. And guess what, those vaulting and grappling mechanics feel different on Unreal, based on the Unreal games I have played, than they have in any of 343's previous works. So, are we back to the drawing board on that front? God, I hope not!

Has There Been A Proper Reflection On Everything That Led To Infinite's Post-Release Situation Being a Mess?

343 Industries was a mess, but rebranding the studio without admitting to that fact is the most Microsoft thing they could do. Sure, Xbox and the likes of Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond continue to lack a proper response to any grilling about studio closures, and expecting Halo Studios to be any different is unfair. Nonetheless, they can't continue to pretend that their loss of senior leadership isn't something we are unaware of anymore. It's not just the loss of Bonnie Ross in 2022 that sticks out to me. The studio lost its creative lead, Joseph Staten, alongside veteran designer David Ellis in 2023. 343 also saw Infinite's multiplayer director, Tom French, leave before the 2023 layoffs, and franchise director Frank O'Connor exit after they spent twenty years with the series. New blood is something that could greatly benefit the Halo series. Still, you don't see this amount of generational talent leave a single studio within a year or two without some studio dysfunction at the root of the problem. Furthermore, who are the new leaders at Halo Studios, and why should we trust that any of these projects are worthy of excitement? As mentioned, 343 Industries was not immune to Microsoft's massive layoffs in 2023. So, did they fire veteran staff only to rebrand the studio and hire a wave of new designers and programmers at a lower cost? That's a depressing prospect if true.

That previous point is why I'm not convinced Halo Studios is being entirely honest when they suggest they are doing multiple projects all within their wheelhouse. You don't lay off nearly 100 people AND experience the massive brain drain of veteran talent as they have and still can get multiple projects off the runway. So, either Halo Studios and Xbox are being facetious, or they're lying through their teeth that they are not outsourcing most of the development of their Halo projects to other studios. By rebranding 343 Industries to "Halo Studios," will we see more examples of what we saw with Halo Wars 2, where all the leading studio did was simple "Lore Checks" while most of the development existed out of network? I think that's very likely. Microsoft would not be alone in embracing this style of studio management, but it does get to the heart of one of the biggest challenges still facing the future of Halo. What will this series emphasize mechanically and narratively with all of these new projects? Also, considering that the multiplayer is the main draw, what seasonal pass format are you embracing? Those discussions must happen before you move on to big AAA projects unless all you are working on is nothing more than reboots or remasters.

And the most significant open question remaining is the most uncomfortable one. What is Microsoft planning for Halo? The switch to Unreal means that whatever your following projects might be, they will be easier to get cooperating on non-Xbox-based hardware. However, how much bang for your buck are you going to get out of releasing a Halo game on PlayStation? If you want to maximize your odds of a good impression, you must drop all the weird ways you released Halo Infinite at launch. People on non-Xbox platforms aren't tolerating having to micro-manage separate downloads for their game's single and multiplayer modes. That's ignoring that having multiple game projects in the pipeline that may take years to come to fruition demands a long-term plan from Xbox and Microsoft in the games industry. I don't know about you, but the fact that Microsoft had to respond to reports that they were entirely exiting the Middle East, but we all apathetically nodded our heads that it was believable when it was first reported, says a lot about the state of gaming in the House of Xbox. Trust me, I want to be wrong because having a revived Halo series with competitive hardware to mix things up would bring me joy and would make things better in this industry. However, that seems like a pie-in-the-sky dream unless I am provided with more evidence to suggest the opposite.