Halo battle royale Tatanka underway for Unreal Engine as 343i ‘hollowed out’-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Halo Infinite – There’s no smoke without fire (pic: Microsoft)

A new report on Halo developer 343 Industries suggests previous rumours were not far from the truth, with the developer ‘starting from scratch’.

For a brief moment in time, following the launch in 2021, Halo Infinite seemed as if it had got the franchise back on track, with a great multiplayer mode and a flawed but enjoyable story campaign. But then it became clear that any updates were going to take months to arrive and the fanbase quickly turned against the game.

Growing dissatisfaction with developer 343 Industries led to rumours that they were being taken off active development and that all single-player content plans had been cancelled.

Microsoft and 343 denied the reports, but using ambiguous enough language that it still left room for them to be substantially true, and according to a new report there are definitely major changes going on at the studio.

Supposedly, 343 is still in charge of the Halo franchise (which is not something the original rumours denied) but a major reorganisation means the studio will be ‘all but starting from scratch’ in terms of staff and future plans.

It’s suggested that at least 95 people, including several veterans, have lost their job as a result of the recent Microsoft cuts, confirming that 343 is the hardest hit of any Xbox studio.

According to Bloomberg, this is where the rumour of 343 no longer taking part in active development came from, but it’s unclear how they’re going to do everything themselves now, given the huge staff turnover and the fact that they’ve committed to switch from their own, decades old, game engine to the industry standard Unreal Engine.

That switch has finally been agreed as 343 starts work on a new game with the codename Tatanka, which started life as a battle royale but ‘may evolve in different directions’.

The new report also confirms that there is no new story content being developed for Halo Infinite, although it suggests that rather than DLC being cancelled previous internal pitches by 343 were for new Halo games using Unreal Engine – all of which were turned down.

343 already uses multiple external studios to make Halo, most notably multiplayer expert Certain Affinity, but it’s still unclear to what degree these relationships will change and how much capacity 343 has to develop games itself.

Although a Halo battle royale has been rumoured for years now it’s unknown how far along the Tatanka project is and whether work on that has been started from scratch, as a result of the staff changes.

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