Microsoft recently announced widespread layoffs, confirming that it was cutting 1,900 jobs across its entire gaming division– which, following the company’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, also includes Blizzard Entertainment. The layoffs have also gone hand-in-hand with the cancellation of Blizzard’s long-in-development survival game, codenamed Odyssey, which was officially confirmed to be in development in 2022, and new report published by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has shed more light on what brought about the highly anticipated project’s cancellation.
As per Schreier’s report, when Odyssey first started development back in 2017, Blizzard was using Unreal Engine for its production, though the team deemed the engine insufficient to support its ambitions to craft massive maps that would have up to 100 players playing on them together.
Following that, development reportedly shifted to Synapse, an internal engine that was initially developed for mobile games. Synapse’s toolsets were slow to catch up to the Odyssey development team’s ambitions for the game though, which meant artists continued to create prototypes in Unreal Engine, knowing that the work would have to be discarded later.
The report goes on to state that though members of the Odyssey team had hoped that they would be able to switch back to Unreal following Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the requirements of the project were ultimately too high. Chiefly, a team that was already over 100 strong would have to be expanded significantly, after which a 2026 release would still be considered an optimistic estimate.
In his report, Schreier says the future of new, experimental projects that don’t belong to established IP is looking “uncertain” at Blizzard following Odyssey’s cancellation. Whether that means we’re unlikely to see anything from the company outside of the likes of Diablo, Warcraft, StarCraft, and Overwatch remains to be seen.
Along with layoffs (which have affected a vast portion of the Odyssey team), Blizzard Entertainment has also seen shake-up at the top, with president Mike Ybarra having announced his departure, and chief design officer Allen Adham also leaving the company.