What Halo on Unreal Engine 5 means for PS5

We asked Digital Foundry.

Today's announcements by the newly-rebranded Halo Studios - formerly 343 Industries - that multiple new Halo games are in development has excited fans of Microsoft's flagship Xbox franchise. But is there cause for celebration for PlayStation 5 owners too?

Halo Studios has said it will now develop all future Halo projects using Unreal Engine 5, the Epic Games-made toolkit for game development that's used widely across the industry. It's set to power the next Witcher and Tomb Raider installments, and can be seen in action this week within the highly-acclaimed Silent Hill 2 remake.

Discussing the move to Unreal Engine, Halo Studios said the change means faster, smoother development and iteration is now possible, while it will also allow for an easier onboarding of new team members who know the toolkit already. On top of this, though, it potentially means easier multiplatform development is now possible - should Microsoft look to extend its cross-platform release program and launch Halo on other consoles.

"From a multi-platform game development perspective, moving to Unreal Engine 5 would certainly be easier for the developer than porting across the existing Slipspace engine," Digital Foundry boss Rich Leadbeatter told me this morning.

"It stands to reason that an engine designed for deployment across multiple platforms would be easier to work with than existing technology built for Xbox and PC."

Xbox is yet to release games from any of its biggest franchises - Halo, Forza, Gears of War - on PlayStation or Switch hardware, but multiple reports have suggested Microsoft is at least seriously considering the option for future installments of its biggest brands, and the direction of trend seems clear.

The writing had been on the wall for Halo's previous Slipspace engine for some time, following the mixed performance of Halo Infinite, the cancellation of plans to further develop the game's campaign, and the loss of the studio's lead developer of Slipspace at the end of 2022. The past few years have seen other departures, too, including then-343 Industries boss Bonnie Ross, director Joseph Staten, multiplayer creative director Tom French, and Halo franchise director Frank O'Connor.

Could Slipspace be ported to PS5? Well, yes, Digital Foundry says. But it would require an extra layer of porting work that using Unreal Engine simply skips over.

"Moving Slipspace to PS5 would be similar to the kind of work many other developers - including those with bespoke game tech - have successfully achieved and I don't see much in Halo Infinite that couldn't be achieved on PS5," Leadbetter tells me.

But clearly this - with the move to UE5 instead - is no longer a going concern. Perhaps the biggest obstacle now would be the optics of launching Xbox's flagship franchise on rival hardware, though today's Xbox Wire blog post makes it clear that none of Halo Studios' fresh projects are set to arrive any time soon.

There's plenty of time, then, for other Microsoft franchises to take the plunge first, following the arrival on PlayStation of four Xbox games earlier this year, and the upcoming PS5 launch of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in early 2025. It will be by no means the last.

Perhaps the biggest clue to how Microsoft may treat Halo in the future can be seen in its motives for bringing Sea of Thieves' to PS5 - and the success it has seen as a result. Ahead of its launch on Sony hardware, Microsoft said it wanted to use Sea of Thieves' PS5 version to further grow the live-service pirate game's online audience - benefiting players on PC and Xbox, too. This indeed seems to have occurred.

"This is complete conjecture," Leadbetter closed, "but Halo Infinite has evolved into the kind of live-service game that would benefit from a multiplatform release, just as Sea of Thieves has."

Back in August, Xbox boss Phil Spencer addressed the continued launch of its games on other console platforms and stated that "Xbox is a business".

"We said we'd watch... I might have said, from our learning, we're gonna do more," Spencer said. "What I see when I look is: our franchises are getting stronger. Our Xbox console players are as high this year as they've ever been. I look at it, and I say, okay: our player numbers are going up for the console platform. Our franchises are as strong as they've ever been. And we run a business.

"There's a lot of pressure on the industry," he concluded. "It's been growing for a long time, and now people are looking for ways to grow. I think us - as fans, as players of games - we just have to anticipate there's going be more change, and how some of the traditional ways that games are built and distributed - that's gonna change. That's gonna change for all of us. But the end result has to be better games that more people can play. If we're not focused on that, I think we're focused on the wrong things."

Time will tell if this change includes Halo on PS5 - or Switch 2. But with the franchise's future being built on Unreal Engine 5, there's one less barrier to making it happen.