343 Industries is pretty much "starting from scratch"

343 Industries was founded 16 years ago with the sole responsibility of handling everything Halo related after Bungie left Microsoft to become independent. Unfortunately, they have never fully been able to deliver the same master pieces as Bungie created, and their latest game Halo Infinite has seen fierce criticism for bugs, lack of support, missing features and stupid decisions like forcing console gamers to play against PC in multiplayer.

In a new Bloomberg report, Jason Schreier has plenty of interesting things to tell us regarding the status of both 343 Industries and Halo. Most are things we've heard rumours about before, but having Schreier writing about them is as close to a confirmation as we're going to get.

It turns out 95 people had to leave the studio during Microsoft's recent layoffs of 10,000+ employees, and this includes several veterans and also big parts of management. According to the report, 343 Industries is now "all but starting from scratch". One of the main things this means is that the new studio head Pierre Hintze has decided to drop the Slipspace engine that was created for Halo Infinite as it was considered very hard to work with, instead they will use Epic's Unreal Engine 5 going forward.

Unfortunately, no new Halo single player content is currently under development, neither DLC or games. It seems that the ten-year plan for Halo Infinite is no longer valid either as "recent moves point to a shorter-term vision".

This doesn't mean we won't get any new Halo though as Certain Affinity is working on Tatanka (working title), which is the Halo Battle Royale game that has been rumoured for quite some time, once intended as content for Halo Infinite, but now a separate title that seemingly evolved "in different directions".

Let's keep our fingers crossed 343 Studios can get the much needed reset it needs and really make a big comeback using Unreal Engine 5 at some point. Until then, hopefully Tatanka will prove to be just what the franchise needed.