Although the news today is that 343 Industries has been renamed to Halo Studios, there is a good news that many may overlook. After months of constant work to rescue that Halo 2 demo we saw at E3 2003, the Digsite team, focused on rescuing and revitalizing classic content from the Halo saga, has announced that we will be able to play this mission thanks to the upcoming update for Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
While it is true that 343 Industries has stopped updating Halo MCC with new content for a while, this does not mean that they do not provide support for the game. Digsite has remained firm in their idea of rescuing content to introduce it officially into this collection. This team, composed of workers and modders from 343 Industries operating freely, announced in 2022 that their big future task would be to recover the Earthcity demo from Halo 2, a mission that was exclusively produced for E3 2003 and that players never got to try. In fact, the only thing that remained from that mission is the name Earth City for one of the game’s soundtrack themes.
Almost in the style of the first look at Killzone 2, albeit without the subsequent cold shower of not resembling the final game at all, as it happened to the PlayStation shooter, the Earthcity demo stood out as an impressive visual spectacle and playable during the beautiful E3 times at the beginning of the millennium. Now, and after months of tireless work, the restoration of this iconic demo will be part of the November 9th update for the Master Chief Collection, only on PC.
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“This was not a trivial process,” commented a spokesperson for the Digsite team, referring to the technical challenge of adapting a demonstration designed for an old game engine to current platforms without compromising the original experience. The team is committed to preserving the authenticity and spirit of the Earthcity demo, and in just a few weeks we will be able to experience it firsthand along with, they add, improved lip syncing, objective markers, AI enhancements, and slightly improved visuals.
Halo confirms its move to Unreal Engine 5
In parallel to this great news, and as mentioned at the beginning, we are facing the new dawn of Halo. Early this morning, at least in Spain, the 343 Industries team confirmed that they would completely change their name to Halo Studios, a clear statement of intent that came with the best news of all: there are “multiple new games in development” using Unreal Engine 5 technology.
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