Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, Feb. 1 (Xinhua)-- Halo developer 343 Industries has lost at least 95 people due to recent layoffs by Microsoft, and the studio is switching from its proprietary Slipspace engine to Epic Games's Unreal engine for future games, Bloomberg reported.

Since the layoffs were announced on January 18th, Halo's future has been up in the air. Halo: infinity performed strongly when it was launched at the end of 2021, but over time, players began to get frustrated with the progress of multiplayer games, with planned features such as online campaign collaboration and Forge (finally launched in November) being repeatedly delayed, and there was no sign that new campaign content was imminent.

CTOnews.com learned that the company had announced that it would continue to develop Halo after layoffs. On January 21, the head of the studio, Pierre Hintze, said in a statement on Twitter on the Halo account: "Halo and sergeant will continue to exist. 343 the industrial company will continue to develop Halo, including epic stories, multiplayer games, and more that make Halo great." "343 will continue to be the internal developer of Halo and the home of Halo," Matt Buddy, who is in charge of Xbox Game Studio, said in an interview with Bloomberg.

But it's not clear when we'll see the next game in the series, so it's hard to know how much 343 will be involved in the series in the future. For example, the studio has worked with Austin-based Certain Affinity to develop a battle game codenamed Tatanka, but the game "may go in a different direction".

It is clear that Tatanka will also be developed on an unreal engine, while future Halo games will also explore the use of an "unreal engine," Bloomberg said. If true, the change marks the shift of another major game developer to the Unreal engine, with Wizards and Cyberpunk developers CD Projekt Red announcing a "multi-year strategic partnership" with Epic Games in March to use the Unreal engine, while in November, Epic said that more than half of all announced next-generation games were made with Unreal engines.

343 apparently did not produce new story content for Halo: infinity, which seems ironic to a game once called Halo the beginning of the next decade and named Infinity. Instead, developers are "prototyping with illusory engines and coming up with ideas for new halo games".

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