Fresh details about Blizzardâs cancelled survival game have been revealed.
On Thursday, Microsoft announced plans to lay off 1,900 staff across Xbox, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard.
Alongside the news, it was confirmed that Blizzardâs president Mike Ybarra and its chief design officer Allen Adham are leaving the studio, and that its untitled survival game, which was announced in January 2022, is no longer in development.
Inspired by games like Minecraft and Rust, the project was codenamed Odyssey, was set in a new universe, and had been in development for six years, according to Bloombergâs sources.
Staff were only informed of its cancellation on Thursday, and itâs claimed that many of the 100-plus people who had been working on it were told they were being let go.
In a leaked internal email, Microsoftâs game content and studios president, Matt Booty, said the company would be âshifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of developmentâ.
According to Bloomberg, the project was ultimately cancelled because of technical issues with the game engine being used to make it.
While it was originally prototyped on Epicâs Unreal Engine, Blizzard executives felt the technology wasnât the right fit because it wouldnât support the goal of having vast maps supporting up to 100 players simultaneously.
Instead, they wanted the Odyssey team to build the game using Synapse, an internal engine the studio had originally created for mobile games and wanted to be shared across many of its projects.
However, itâs claimed that this suite of tools and technology was slow to coalesce, and Odyssey was ultimately canceled when they concluded that Synapse was not production ready.
âAs difficult as making these decisions are, experimentation and risk taking are part of Blizzardâs history and the creative process,â Blizzard spokesman Andrew Reynolds said.
âIdeas make their way into other games or in some cases become games of their own. Starting something completely new is among the hardest things to do in gaming, and weâre immensely grateful to all of the talented people who supported the project.â