I really hope they don’t switch to UE5. I know the engine is impressive but as a tech lover, I’m not a fan of the industry further consolidating to only a handful of engines. We’ve already seen other studios like Crystal Dynamics and CD Project Red announce they are dropping their internal engines for UE5 and I’d hate to see the same with 343i. I’d rather they work to iron out the tech dept found in Slipspace and provide more efficient tools and documentation. I understand that UE5 may help with their content pipeline now that Halo is a GaaS game, but I have to wonder what might be lost by such a move. This is also another of the million reasons why chasing the service model was a mistake for the team.
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I’ll say this, Halo Infinite and forge won’t change. With all the leadership changes I have no clue what sequels and the Certain Affinity mode might be made with. I imagine most plans and timetables were flipped on their head with all the new people in charge.
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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.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if other titles used UE; both Halo Wars titles used different engines, as did the Spartan titles. Xbox leadership has been very vocal about not enforcing devs to use a particular engine.
That said, at least in gaming, I don’t often find the saying of “where there’s smoke there’s fire” to be true… in fact the amount of rumors that we’ve seen generated from no-name sources turn out to be false eclipses those that are true, I’d argue. Still waiting on that Sony published Metal Gear and Silent Hill… among dozens of others.
Aside from previous testing with UE4 and the fact that UE is used in MCC for its UI, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something similar and this is another example of crossed-wires. I do find it funny how it went from “343 is changing to UE for Infinite” to the backtracking of “UE might be used for future Halo titles”. Tatanka and other titles are fair game… just as side titles have always done.
Edit: I won’t get into specifics but I’ve been told by a former dev that there’s a reason Infinite wasn’t built on UE, and it’s not just due to its open-world issues, and I very much doubt UE5 would fix said issue.
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So forgive my ignorance because I really don’t know. But you said UE has open world issues, does it really though? The amount of open world games on UE4 and open world games being made on UE5 says otherwise.
Sorry was in a hurry, I should have specified - texture streaming and LODs were still an issue during testing. Obviously, it’s better with UE5 from what we’ve seen thus far.
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I don’t think UE4 have that many open world games. UE5 seems to be much better in that regard.
Can’t speak on UE5 since it’s still early days for that engine, but with UE4, yes it certainly had issues with open world rendering. One of the issues was how well it handled objects in an open world. Consider how barren the open area sections of Gears 5 were even though Coalition heavily modified the UE4 and are some of the best UE devs in the industry. Games like Crackdown 3 and Days Gone had to heavily modify UE4 to suit their needs for open world games.
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Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Because I know Borderlands 3 and all the Arkham games are on Unreal. Couldn’t think of anything else, then I just did a quick google search. And there is a lot
It’s (I think) public knowledge they did test using UE previously, but Halo seemingly has a ‘feel’ that’s not easily emulated.
Do I think that Halo Infinite will be ‘remade’ in Unreal? No.
Do I think that they would release Halo titles on Unreal in the future? Is that feasible? Yes.
Note: This is my personal opinion and not based on any inside knowledge.
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100%.
How many of those UE4 are open-world?
Speaking to one of the former 343i devs, they think using UE as a kind of wrapper is a possibility, similar to what we saw happen in MCC. I wonder if it would be possible to use UE to help with the content creation pipeline side of things and import those assets into Slipspace.
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Click the link, it’s divided between the engines
Between engines, but I am talking not about the amount of games but open-world only for UE4
Well im not going through that entire list lol, but here’s a few
Ashen
The new Atomic Hearts games
Gotham Knights (pretty much all the Arkham games)
Borderlands 3
Dead Island 2
Blade & Soul (MMO)
Ashes of creation (soon to release MMO)
And others
I think UE4 was notorious for being bad for open world games.
The Arkham games are built on a heavily, heavily modified version of UE3.
Regarding Borderlands 3, does that use the same kind of zones or hub sections that we saw in Borderlands 1 and 2?
Also it’s important to note that I don’t think anyone is saying open world games can’t be done in UE4, just that the engine wasn’t well suited for it. Most of the open world games we’ve seen required heavy modification like Crackdown and Days Gone, some form of limitations like Borderlands 3 and Gears 5, or had some glaring technical issues like the Arkham remasters or Ark Survival evolved.
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Yeah, @KageMaru gave a good post further up. Was just curious is all because I know open world games have been made it.
CDPR is going with UE5 and helping them improve it for open world stuff as well.
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