Evolving a Legend: Bringing Halo to Unreal Engine 5 | Unreal Fest Chicago 2026

How do you move one of the most iconic 25‑year‑old game franchises from its proprietary tech stack onto a modern engine without breaking its soul?

In this session recorded at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026, Halo Studios takes you behind the scenes of Halo’s multi‑year transition to Unreal Engine 5—a journey filled with breakthroughs, pitfalls, paradigm shifts, and a whole lot of learning.

The team explores how this shift reshaped every discipline across the studio, from production rhythms to engineering mindsets to art workflows. You’ll hear how they re‑thought development methodology, rebuilt pipelines, retrained teams, and re‑examined assumptions that had been embedded in the franchise for decades. Along the way, they share the good, the bad, and the genuinely exciting moments when new tech unlocked ideas that were never possible before.

Whether you’re leading a franchise reboot, modernizing a legacy codebase, or just curious, this talk offers practical lessons, surprising discoveries, and a candid look at what it really takes to reinvent a AAA pipeline while building ‘Halo’ for the future.

Find out more about using Unreal Engine to develop games here: unrealengine.com/uses/games

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