343 Industries is “starting over”: Jason Schreier steers the future of Halo games

The Washingtonian 343 Industries studio has been one of the most impacted by the recent wave of layoffs that occurred at Microsoft in mid-January, but perhaps we did not know to what extent these decisions have impacted the upper echelons of developers. Halo. According to Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, almost a hundred workers have been laid off from their jobs, many of whom received “a few days’ notice.”

When you do the math, that’s a relatively low proportion compared to the 10,000 employees leaving their seats in the Redmond titan, but we’re talking about a team that had about 750 talents on payroll (as of 2020). We know that several of those affected were part of the high positions, too; in such a way that even -among others- the very same screenwriter Joseph Staten, one of the fathers of the entire franchise.

On the other hand, we recently learned more details about the future of the franchise: the continuation of the Halo universe is guaranteed, but it will not happen in the slipspace engine as we originally expected. Instead, the engine that had been built from scratch to cover Halo Infinite will be replaced by the Unreal Engine for the foreseeable future. That will affect, among others, the secret project (at the public level, at least) known as Tatanka.

Halo Infinite has had a first year of life Really Hard: After going through a run-down development and plagued by multiple delays, the community reacted negatively to the content droughts that plagued post-launch support, including bringing back features and functionality like split-screen co-op that were once taken for granted. However, at the moment it does not seem that the support is in danger.