Blizzard Entertainment canceled its in-development survival game, codenamed Odyssey, this Thursday after Microsoft laid off 8% of its gaming division.
This shakeup occurred only three months after Microsoft officially acquired Activision Blizzard in a $69 billion deal. Alongside the layoffs of much of Odyssey’s team, President Mike Ybarra also exited the company.
In a new report by Bloomberg, more details about Odyssey have come out. The game had a team of over 100 people, and was in development for over six years prior to its cancellation. It was to be a completely original franchise.
In a statement to Bloomberg, Blizzard spokesperson Andrew Reynolds cited “a focus on projects that hold the most promise for future growth” as a reason for the cancellation, likely referring to the company’s existing IPs like Overwatch and World of Warcraft. Not all of the team was laid off, as Blizzard would “move some of the people on the team to one of several exciting new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development.”
The game was pitched as a polished survival game similar to Minecraft and Rust, and was pitched by Blizzard veteran Craig Amai. Development began in 2017, with an official announcement in 2022 and a steadily growing team over time.
Odyssey was prototyped on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, but the engine could not support the grand vision for the game, which involved large maps holding up to 100 player simultaneously. The team then switched to Synapse, an engine developed by Blizzard, but the previous prototype was slow to adapt, and a significant portion had to be discarded.
Though the project was coming along, it was still a ways off from release, with a 2026 target that would require a significantly expanded team. In the end, the company decided that the Synapse engine was not ready for production and cancelled the project.
“As difficult as making these decisions are, experimentation and risk taking are part of Blizzard’s history and the creative process,” Reynolds said. “Ideas 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 we’re immensely grateful to all of the talented people who supported the project.”
With 1,900 jobs cut from Microsoft’s game division, the future of original projects for Blizzard is unclear.