The Halo franchise is going to look a bit different going forward, starting with developer 343 Industries itself. The company announced Sunday that it’s rebranding to Halo Studios to mark a whole “new approach” to development, along with multiple new Halo projects.
This is the second time in history that the Halo series will be developed under a different name. The first three Halo games was developed by Bungie, followed by 343 Industries, which was formed inside Microsoft after Bungie opted to go independent.
“If you really break Halo down, there have been two very distinct chapters. Chapter 1 – Bungie. Chapter 2 – 343 Industries,” studio head Pierre Hintze said in an Xbox Wire post. “Now, I think we have an audience which is hungry for more. So we’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games.”
The first big change is to transition from using the proprietary Slipspace engine to Unreal Engine 5. Halo Infinite, the franchise’s last new mainline game, was made on the engine, but it required a lot of internal upkeep. It’s made from decades-old Bungie code, and according to Bloomberg, that partially led to Infinite‘s long development cycle, along with a dependance on contract workers, and a switch to remote work because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bloomberg reported early last year that the company would be switching over to Unreal after a series of disappointments. While Infinite had a positive launch, the edges started to show soon after. The multiplayer’s post-launch releases were received negatively by the fan base that cited overpriced cosmetics, slow progression, and thin updates, but game modes were also delayed due to problems with Slipspace. Basically, the switch to Unreal is a long time coming, and will allow the team to work on more projects.
“Respectfully, some components of Slipspace are almost 25 years old,” art director Chris Matthews said in the post. “Although 343 were developing it continuously, there are aspects of Unreal that Epic has been developing for some time, which are unavailable to us in Slipspace — and would have taken huge amounts of time and resources to try and replicate.”
“We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite,” Hintze said in the Halo Studios announcement. “[But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible.”
Halo Studios has been working in Unreal with Project Foundry, which isn’t a new game but a demonstration of how the Epic Games engine can be used with the Halo series. The company showed off some example clips at the 2024 Halo World Championship on Sunday. As for the new Halo games in the works, we don’t have any information on them just yet.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.