I wrote a bit about the benefits of using an engine like UE for Halo, if it was adopted 3-4 years ago, in the official Halo thread.
Right now they’re in too deep to make any switch with Infinite. With Forge just around the corner it doesn’t make any sense at all to make a switch.
But Tatanka is a completely different beast. The fact that it hasn’t even been officially announced gives them so much more flexibility.
When people think Unreal Engine they think about great visuals but in this particular case what is most valuable is a tried and true large scale multiplayer game engine that fully supports live service content creation.
With Infinite we are dealing with desync issues. Fortnite, on the other hand, is handling tens of thousands of 100 player battles every week with little issue. With Infinite we are seeing an apparent difficulty in adding new content including weapon skins and armour but Fortnite has been adding new content, some of it completely transformative, for 5 years now.
So yeah a lot of people think that the visuals will be great, and I’m sure they will, but the big thing is all of this other stuff that exists on the back end.
Tatanka will not need to support Forge. May possibly default to an external 3rd person view. It might feel a bit different. It can afford to be a completely different Halo game. With no announcements there has been no expectations set.
I’m sure it was looked to be an expansion for Infinite or a different mode. But at this stage It actually does make a lot of sense to move to UE.
The secondary benefit being that the next Halo game after Infinite can be built off of this rather quickly and a lot of experience could be carried over to the next Halo campaign and small scale multiplayer experience.