Talking Point: Would Halo Infinite Have Been A Bigger Success Using Unreal Engine 5?

Last year, Xbox made the announcement that it was rebranding 343 Industries to Halo Studios, in an attempt to reboot its most famous series and give the developer a new lease of life. With that reboot comes a switch to Unreal Engine 5, but should that move have come sooner? Would Halo Infinite have been a bigger success using the widespread Epic Games engine? Who knows, but new information suggests that almost became a reality.

Halo aficionado Rebs Gaming has just posted a new report detailing some of the development on 2021’s Halo Infinite. The report goes over an internal documentary from 2017 that shows 343 weighing up a move to Unreal Engine 5 – and even discussing the move with the folks over at Gears studio The Coalition. In the end, it was decided that Infinite would stick with the existing Halo engine, and we’re left wondering if that was the right move for the game.

Ultimately, Halo Infinite feels fantastic to play and we still enjoy dipping into multiplayer fairly often. However, the game did have its documented content issues around launch, with players growing ever-frustrating by the speed in which new updates arrived. We can’t help but think that post-launch process could have been much smoother with the well-supported Unreal Engine 5 – and the game may have lived longer in the wider public conscience as a result.

We’ll never quite know how Halo Infinite on UE5 would have fared, but it does look like the whole development process prompted Xbox to move the series over to the Epic engine for future games. Here’s hoping that proves to be the right move in the coming years, but only time will tell whether we’ll all be yearning for the Slipspace engine somewhere down the line.

How do you look back on Halo Infinite these days? Would UE5 have given it a higher chance of success? Talk to us about it all down below.