Unreal Engine

There is more information available on this subject at Unreal Engine on the English Wikipedia.

The Unreal Engine is a game engine maintained by Epic Games. It was initially developed for Unreal, a 1998 PC first-person shooter. It has remained Epic Games' engine of choice since its inception, with games such as Gears of War and more recently Fortnite being built in the engine, but the engine is most notable for its role as a third-party engine available to any game developer, in exchange a royalty fee, with thousands of games having been built using it, to date.

In 2019, alongside the launch of Halo: Reach's port to the game, Unreal Engine 4 (the then-latest version of Unreal Engine) was introduced to Halo: The Master Chief Collection to handle the unified UI elements, as the original implementation of the UI was built in a framework that was no longer supported.

According to video game journalist Jason Schreier, during Halo Infinite's troubled development, 343 Industries spent months evaluating a potential migration to Unreal Engine instead of Halo's traditional engine, the Blam engine. This was due to the fact that the two decade-old engine, and in particular a constituent toolset entitled Faber, was incredibly hard to work with and had become fraught with technical debt, making it difficult to update and improve. Ultimately, 343 chose not to migrate to Unreal, and instead persevered with the Blam engine, creating a significantly overhauled version for Halo Infinite, which they dubbed the Slipspace Engine.

Games using the Unreal Engine

The following Halo games utilise the Unreal Engine:

• Halo: The Master Chief Collection (2014) (Unreal Engine added in 2019)