What’s the excellent point about using Unreal Engine 5 and switching from SplipSpace to this engine – it’s straightforward. The Slipspace engine was developed around 2016, going up to around 2017-2018. And telling the truth, it’s still been tweaked for Halo Infinite.
This engine is the next thing for Halo, and it can support this live service, add content, pull new content, whatever it might be for the next ten years. However, developers faced massive issues with Microsoft contractor policy, people leaving, and this enormous turnover of staff in Microsoft and 343.
This engine wasn’t good enough for people who left, and new people tweaked it.
With this brand-new engine, people will have to come in and essentially learn how to use it from scratch. Now the base level of coding will most likely be the same, but it would work very differently from the Unreal Engine. The UE is accessible to anyone, and you can download it on your PC and start testing it out. Gamers need to understand how big this is for Halo to move over to this engine. Microsoft is understanding now and learning from its mistakes of having an extremely secluded engine to one game.
This is a fascinating time for Halo if this leak is legit, but we still don’t know how the game will look and how the game will feel, and all the other significant differences remain unknown. Current engine will be better supported because it hosts many other games. This isn’t just an engine used for one game in particular. The Unreal Engine is used in most projects because it’s a good engine. Including optimization and graphical improvements, the possibility for the developers to work within the current engine is almost endless. And the Slipspace engine isn’t even close to UE. The main disadvantage is that you are extremely limited in what you can do on the Slipspace engine. Cross-core customization stays because of engine limitations, but with Unreal 5, you can program and code anything.
This is the best decision that 343 has made since they took over Halo. Because the Slipspace engine is complete garbage – working on it is impossible. It had desynchronization and all kinds of problems because they rushed the game out. At this point, it just doesn’t make sense to keep supporting the old engine, and the company needs to start with a new one.
343 is abandoning the Slipspace engine on Halo. Millions of dollars for developing and upgrading the pre-existing Halo Blam engine? Unfortunately, they ran into a lot of issues, and everything we have heard was that:
- The Slipspace engine is a nightmare to deal with
- new employees have to spend ages learning how to use it
- user-unfriendly interface
- very hard to add new content on top of existing data.
In the meantime, 343 is banking on Forge, as there will be many new players, modes, and maps while they work on and transition to this new engine. Anyway, this is still a rumor. However, we genuinely hope this is the actual information about Halo’s future, as this would be a significant step in the right direction for Halo developers.