Digital Foundry Impressed By Halo: Campaign Evolved, But Worried About Unreal Engine 5

In its latest weekly podcast episode, the folks over at Digital Foundry have discussed last week’s Halo: Campaign Evolved reveal – and the team’s thoughts are mixed on the title despite being impressed by Halo Studios’ vision thus far.

The gist of DF’s discussion revolves around two main things: Halo Studios art style for the remake, and its Unreal Engine 5 technology base. The team seems pretty impressed with the look of the game generally and how the developer is reimagining a classic, but the number of visible UE5 issues on display are causing concern.

Here’s some of what host John Linneman had to say on things:

“When I see this I see a lot of amazing things, but I also see a lot I can nit-pick, but I feel like the job that they [Halo Studios] were faced with — remaking something like this — is pretty massive because it’s so engrained in people’s memories. The first thing I’ll say is that this is a gigantic leap visually, stylistically over the original remaster [from 2011]. This comes far closer to matching the look and feel of the original Halo but with modern technology. I’m liking what they’re doing here.

But unfortunately, we’ve reached this point now where there’s complete global saturation of Unreal Engine 5. And you just instantly see all the UE5 things popping out […] You see all the noise, the fizzle, the micro-traversal stutters, the Lumen issues, plus the low resolution – you just kind of see those limitations sticking out like a sore thumb if you will.”

Linneman is quick to note that this is all early footage of course, and that Halo Studios will likely be working on this for the best part of another year before the remake actually hits public release. There is concern over the Halo: Campaign Evolved engine though, and whether the dev team can iron out issues that seem ingrained with the Epic Games’ technology itself.

The chat leads on to fellow host Alex Battaglia also discussing their concerns with Unreal Engine 5, in a little more detail, before Richard Leadbetter adds some of their own thoughts. If you’d like to see the full discussion we recommend tuning into the video up above; the Halo: Campaign Evolved discussion happens for the first 20-minutes or so of the podcast!