A new rumor has emerged of a new Halo game in active development, though the finer details remain hazy.
In a new episode of Bitcast, co-host Ains suddenly made this claim in regards to a new Halo game:
“Do I have any info on the Halo campaign? The short answer is nothing specific. What I can say, what I know anyway, is that yes, they do have a team working on the next Halo campaign. It is part of the restructure that is building the next generation of Halo on Unreal.”
Ains is also editor-in-chief of his own gaming website, Seasoned Gaming. So while he may not be a familiar name to most, his claims of having insider information about new Halo projects is at least a bit credible.
The last game in Microsoft’s venerable franchise is Halo Infinite, which released in 2021.We had reported on many issues behind the scenes in the production of Halo Infinite. There had been so many people who left developer 343 Studios, that it has lead to essentially a restructuring of the studio.
But we won’t dwell on that history here. If we look at it in terms of the history of Halo releases, Microsoft has slowed down how long it takes for them to get between releases, and they need to pick up the pace again.
It only took three years between Halo and Halo 2, as well as Halo 2 and Halo 3. In contrast, it took six years between Halo 5 and Halo Infinite. Even taking into account how much longer it takes to make games compared to one or two decades ago, Microsoft can get more games out for the franchise more rapidly than this.
The rumor about Halo moving to Unreal is interesting. Earlier in this year, we had reported that 343 planned to stick by their own engine, Slipspace. However, a few months before that, several sources had corroborated and agreed on the rumor that 343 was dropping Slipspace in favor of Unreal.
Among Unreal’s many qualities is the fact that it is easier to use to make multiplatform games with. That’s because Unreal has support across multiple platforms. Does this mean the next Halo could be coming to the PlayStation 5?
That’s unlikely, but 343 could still see a lot of benefits from making this move. Unreal would ease development of the game across Xbox Series X|S, Windows, and cloud gaming platforms. There are other benefits to switching to Unreal too, of course.
The way Ains described it, 343 did not just start working on this game. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft makes an announcement about this potential new game in the near future.
