Halo SWITCHING To Unreal Engine?!?
Alright, what’s up? I’m doing another Halo video because Halo rumors are always fun to cover. And this one isn’t so much a rumor anymore, because it was broken by Jason Schreier of Bloomberg.
Microsoft and 343 Industries will still make Halo games, despite the rumors to the contrary. But with the mass layoffs (at least 95 people) and an engine pivot to Unreal, and its focus only on multiplayer for the near future, 343 is hitting the reset button. This engine pivot to Unreal is actually happening, confirmed and corroborated by Jason Schreier. The original news broke back in October by SeanW, and even I was really skeptical. I honestly couldn’t see it working. Working in development and seeing games in general, the thought of switching over to Unreal just didn’t seem like it would make that much fiscal sense.
It’s kind of like, not only do you have to pay a license to Epic (which Microsoft can obviously afford), but it seemed like the amount of change that you need to make for Halo… Now, I can’t say I know Slipspace (or Blam) all that well, but it seemed like it being proprietary was one of the main factors in Halo having such a slow development time. When you’re developing in something that’s proprietary, not only when you hire someone do they have to learn the new system, but once they learn the new system, they start coding and then they get all the gotchas of that system. Whereas Unreal, being open and something that everyone’s kind of taught on early, makes it easy for people to just jump in and start working.
So, it does make sense from that perspective; you can bring new employees on really, really quickly. But you definitely lose a lot of your legacy feel of Halo. So, I don’t know how I totally feel about it, but they’re doing it. It doesn’t really matter how I feel about it; it’s happening.
Tonka and Certain Affinity will be pushing Unreal. John Owens said Halo transitioning to Unreal is both surprising and sensible. As the teams behind commercial engines specialize and engines become more general and reliable, it makes less sense to invest the money and developer time to roll your own. I 100% agree. I’ve worked in companies where we rolled out our own frameworks, and after a while, we just can’t keep up with open-source frameworks, and it just doesn’t make sense to keep developing our own, especially when those open-source frameworks solve a lot of problems you haven’t even encountered yet.
There will still be proprietary engines, especially at first-party studios. The first-party incentives are often different to create the best-looking and most performant game possible in the hardware, and a specialized engine can have an advantage there over a general one. They’re basically saying Blam will always work better on, say, Xbox hardware, whereas Unreal tries to work great on everything.
That’s part of what makes this change surprising: that it’s a first-party, tentpole franchise, probably the best place for a proprietary engine, and yet they’re moving to Unreal. In the best-case scenario, the ubiquity of Unreal can help lower development costs, especially for games that aren’t trying to push boundaries.
Here’s the thing: Unreal Engine looks freaking amazing. If you’ve seen the new Fortnite update and what they’re doing in Unreal with nanites, they’ve gotten the graphics and that stuff down pretty freaking good. So, Unreal is not a shitty engine. Let’s not twist things. Unreal is a freaking dope engine that a lot of dope games are built on. The biggest real problem right now is transitioning a game to Unreal. What frustrates me is knowing that because we’re going Unreal, we’re going to be losing time. If Tatanka was going to come out this year, now switching to Unreal is going to cost them at least another two years.
Patrick Wren, a former 343 dev who used to work on multiplayer for Infinite before he left after launch, said this is a huge thing. It took a minimum of six months to ramp up someone on Slipspace just for them to do minimum work, and then another six months to really work at speed. Colby painted in an interview that the ramp-up time was three to four months in an interview with Kevin Kulek. It depends on what you’re doing and where you are in production; it fluctuates. But my resume has always been slightly longer. It also depends on the person; some are quicker, and some take a bit to learn new tools. After about three to four months, I was in the engine designing my first Outpost for Red vs. Blue.
In comparison to film, when you go from one film stage to another, you don’t have to reinvent the camera. There’s standard tech that makes it easier to hop between jobs than in games, which I’d argue is an important part of why their union structure works. So, devs are saying it used to take people six months to get onto Slipspace. Hopefully, that’s reduced with Unreal. Bathroom Spartan… we didn’t know yesterday that, you know, from the leaks they had leaks from December which showed that Tatanka was still being built in Slipspace. So, I don’t know if he was trying to water down rumors of the switch to Unreal thing. No, no, no. Look, I got things happening that show that it’s still happening. I read some other reports that said Tatanka was being developed in December still in Slipspace, but I’m making a decision now saying, look, it’s still not out. We still got time. Let’s just scrap it and start transitioning all of it over into Unreal. That makes sense to me too.
So, all this, both things could be true. They could have been working to release Tatanka in Slipspace and then decided, look, it’s time. We got upper management to sign off, and we’re going all Unreal. Jess Hordain also corroborated it, saying that now he’s able to, because originally when the first rumor came out, he said he couldn’t corroborate it.
A year ago, I linked Halo to Tatanka. I wanted to get more sources of an Unreal before pulling the trigger again on that scene, so there was a big internal tug-of-war. You had some teams who were like, no, we gotta stick with Blam, we gotta keep going with Slipspace, let’s not waste time doing this Unreal thing. Another team was like, look, we can solve a lot of problems if they were currently facing by going Unreal. I think their biggest problem is just when they’re trying to bring on junior devs and they have this contractor turnover. Bringing contractors on who know Unreal is going to make them a lot more efficient than bringing contractors on who know Unreal but aren’t going to learn Slipspace.
It seems like there was an internal tug-of-war, and then once Bonnie Ross and some of the team who were more Slipspace were outed, the Unreal side won. So that is where we’re going there. They actually did release a Windows Central report, which I suggest everyone take a look at; it was pretty cool. One thing that they talked about here was with the move through Unreal, they’re also looking at potentially bringing Halo to other devices, like it won’t just be an Xbox thing. Some people took that to mean it’s going to be coming to Playstation. My bet is it means that we’ll see some Halo stuff going to Mobile, because that seems to be a big place that Microsoft wants to focus on, and part of why I think the Activision move is happening is so that they could get a greater mobile presence. Also, Activision doesn’t just make Call of Duty; they also make Candy Crush, one of the most successful mobile money-making games.
So there you have it. Something that’s been corroborated by a lot of people. SeanW was right, I was wrong. Congratulations, Sean! Should never have doubted you. But hey, two more years of Infinite at best, and then it looks like we’re just gonna move everything over to Tatanka, which some are saying is going to be a standalone game. So let’s see where that goes. Anyway, catch you guys in the next video. Peace!
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