GRTV News - 343 Industries đổi tên thành Halo Studios

Phiên âm âm thanh

"Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of GRTV News. It's a new week! And well, we're actually starting the week with a really, really big bit of news.
You see, over the past weekend has been the Halo World Championship, which obviously is the big event where the best Halo teams and players in the world all come together to compete for a big cash prize and obviously a trophy as well."

"And I think this year it was being held in Seattle on the west coast of the USA.
But that's not the story. We're not talking about the Halo World Championship today.
We're talking about 343 Industries and the Halo franchise as a whole.
Because as part of the Halo World Championship, and we see this quite frequently actually with big esports events, they often, you know, developers and the companies that make the game that's the focal point of said tournament, they usually use it as an opportunity to make a big announcement and to reveal tons of information about the games that they are working on."

"And for Halo and 343 Industries involved a lot of things, including a name change, an engine switch, multiple sort of, I guess in a way, announced projects.
But either way, there's a lot of things to talk about. So let's dive on in.
So 343 Industries changes its name to Halo Studios and has multiple projects in development."

"After Halo Infinite, many people feared that Microsoft would move away from Halo, but it seems like they are more confident in the series than ever.
So there has been a lot of turmoil around 343 Studios, which I believe is actually called 343 Industries.
But anyway, in the last couple of years, although Halo 4 and Halo 5 Guardians were great games, they never reached quite the same quality and popularity as Bungie's classics."

"The idea was therefore to rectify all of that with Halo Infinite, which was described beforehand as a bit of a soft reboot.
But after the game was shown properly with gameplay for the first time, it did not live up to expectations at all. And it was delayed considerably."

"Thanks to that, it was a really good game, which premiered in late 2021.
But it soon became clear that 343 Studios was behind on development and the multiplayer was basically left to fend for itself without proper support for almost a year.
Since then, a lot of people have left the studio, including executives, and there has been speculation that they would now step away from Halo and rely more on external development in the future and possibly work on other series."

"But that certainly doesn't seem to be the case. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In a new video released during the 2024 Halo World Championships, it is announced that 343 is changing its name to Halo Studios.
After both Bonnie Ross and Joseph Staten left the studio last year, it is instead the relatively new trio of Brian Kosky, Elisabeth van Dyck and Pierre Hintze who are in charge of everything Halo."

"And the latter confirms that they have multiple new experiences in development.
And of course, we're looking forward to that.
At the moment, nothing Halo-related has been announced, but at least we now know that it's coming and that Microsoft doesn't seem to want to come back on Halo but rather invest even more."

"Now, you can check out the informative video below, which has plenty to offer Halo fans.
I'm not going to play it, but if you do want to watch it, it's there.
So yeah, Halo is...
Oh, I should say, 343 are switching names to Halo Studios."

"Now, I personally, first of all, before we talk about the other big thing as well, which I'll switch to in a minute, I don't think that the name switch is necessary.
I get that it is in many ways sort of like an opportunity for a fresh start for them, right?
They've had a lot of sort of misfires, should we say, with Halo as of late."

"And switching from 343 to Halo Studios is...
Yeah, again, kind of an opportunity for them to, again, reboot in a way.
But if I'm right in saying, I can't remember the actual law behind it, but 343 is like an important name in the Halo series as a whole, right?
So it's not like it was a random name."

"It was always part of Halo as a whole, and that's why it was the Halo Studio that was making all the Halo games, because it was 343.
So I'm not really too sure why that was necessary, but it is nice to see that they haven't given up on Halo."

"Halo is a huge franchise that deserves better treatment, and it deserves a better focus and more resources put into it.
And while it looked like Halo was potentially on the way out a bit, if they have multiple projects in development, that's clearly not the case."

"Now the question is, right, what are 343, or should we say Halo Studios, now going to be building Halo on?
Well, let me bring you to this one now.
So all future Halo games will be developed with Unreal Engine."

"Epic Games, Halo is such an incredible franchise, and it's awesome to see Halo Studios already pushing the boundaries of Unreal Engine 5.
So we were recently able to report on 343, that 343 no longer exists, but it's now undergone a name and strategy change."

"It's now called Halo Studios, which gives a possibly even clearer indication of what they will be working on in the future.
And it's a lot, apparently, because representatives from the studio confirmed during the 2024 Halo World Championship that it involves several new titles."

"But we almost expected that.
And perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that a persistent rumor from the past two years has now been confirmed.
Just as several leaks and insiders have said, Halo will be developed with Unreal Engine 5 going forward."

"Via Xbox Wire, it's now confirmed that all future Halo projects will use the engine, and it already is now announced that multiple new games are in development.
It's, of course, a huge change.
Their slipspace game engine has components that are almost 25 years old in it, so it's clearly time for something new."

"Studio head Pierre Hinze even says that it will be a whole new chapter for the Halo universe.
And he says, if you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters.
Chapter 1, which is Bungie. Chapter 2, 343 Industries.
Now I think we have an audience which is hungry for more."

"So we're not going to go try and improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games.
We start a new chapter today.
Another thing Halo Studios wants to emphasise is how difficult it has been to find people who can work with their old technology, where no one knows slipspace beforehand."

"Therefore, new employees first have to spend a long time with this before they can move on to making game content.
As if that wasn't enough, the studio has to continuously build and improve its graphics engine instead of being able to spend more time on the actual games."

"COO Elizabeth Van Wick says that part of the conversation we had was about how we helped the team focus on making games versus making the tools and the engines.
The question continues, how long does it take to ramp somebody up to be able to actually create assets that show up in your game?
If you watch the video below where all this is presented, we get to see graphics from something Halo Studios calls Project Foundry."

"This isn't a game, but something they've been playing around with to explore UE5.
That doesn't mean we should forget about having any of this in the future game, as Hintze concludes.
It's fair to say that our intent is that the majority of what we showcase in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects."

"We know that a lot of design is familiar from Halo Combat and Valve, where there have been rumours of an upcoming remake.
Whether there is any truth to this, we don't know, but we would say that the chances of it being real have increased after the images and video below."

"So, I think this is the big thing for me.
The name change is...
You know, it gives them an opportunity for a bit of a fresh start, but I don't think it's necessarily necessary."

"The additional projects in the work is exciting, but this change to Unreal Engine 5 is a huge deal, because, yeah, Slipspace...
Well, it can show and it can deliver really quite exceptional results."

"As we saw in Halo Infinite, I mean, aside from the game lacking content, Halo Infinite was, for the most part, a really quite well-put-together game.
But, the Slipspace engine is ancient.
The Slipspace engine requires a lot of investment and a lot of energy to go in and continually improve it, so that they can produce games that come out like Halo Infinite in the end."

"Whereas UE5 is obviously...
It's Epic Games' platform, which they continuously look to improve, meaning developers just pick it up and they can use it to their full advantages."

"So...
And as well, yes, the thing about bringing in new developers, Unreal Engine 5 is widely accessible, so anyone can get their hands on it, really, fiddle around with it, become familiar with it, and then, if they get employed at Halo Studios, they can just slot right into the team and help make the game."

"Whereas, obviously, with Slipspace, you have to sort of train them up and teach them how to actually use the engine before they can start producing content and assets in it."

"But...
So that's the big thing for me, is that it's going to be switching to UE5.
We've seen some exceptional results from UE5 as well, as of late, and it seems like it's quite an intuitive engine because people seem to be turning around projects really quickly with it as well."

"So, potentially, with it being on UE5, we'll be getting a Halo game much faster than we would be if they were sticking with Slipspace.
But they haven't announced anything, actually, in regards to that."

"They've said that they have multiple projects in the works, but they haven't told us what those games are, they haven't told us anything official about them.
So..."

"Let's say that this Chapter 3 of Halo, as Pierre Hintze mentioned, it's exciting, but, again, I don't think we should be seeing necessarily any big results for the next foreseeable future."

"But, as we do see, if we do hear anything official, we'll be sure to keep you posted and updated.
And, otherwise, if you haven't already, go on to your local GameRantor region, go and watch the video, because it gives you a good visualisation of what Halo Studios plan to do with Halo in the future."

"But that's all the time that I have on a long episode of GRTV News, but a lot of big information to get through, so...
So, yeah.
But, yeah, I'll be back now tomorrow for the next one, so, until then, hope you enjoy your Monday, and I'll see you all on the other side."

"Take care, everyone."