There’s a new trend in video game development. Game studios, even large ones, are binning their own bespoke engines and moving to Unreal Engine instead. We’ve seen it with CDPR and The Witcher, we’ve seen it with Crystal Dynamics and Tomb Raider, and now it’s happening to another huge franchise: Halo.
343 Industries, the beleagured steward of the franchise, faced a lot of criticism upon the initial reveal of Halo Infinite, largely over its graphics. Despite significant improvements up to and beyond the game’s launch, it’s clear that the game didn’t live up to expectations and now the developer is ‘all but starting from scratch’ on the next Halo game, with at least 95 developers fired and a switch to Unreal Engine 5 planned – according to a Bloomberg report.
It’s this story that dominates this week’s Digital Foundry Direct discussions, with John Linneman, Alex Battaglia and special guest Sam Machkovech expressing their views on the matter.
In my view, it’s a tragedy, both for the developers involved and the Slipspace Engine that powered Halo Infinite. The demise of in-house engines necessarily means a loss in variety when it comes to rendering techniques, art styles and more, and even contributes to issues like the Stutter Struggle epidemic – our term for the shader compilation stutters that plagued PC games, most frequently Unreal Engine 4 releases, over the past few years. It also puts a lot of power into the hands of Unreal Engine creators Epic, who have done well to push graphical rendering techniques forward over the years but (understandably) have their own preferences for how games ought to play, ought to look and ought to be developed.