Blizzard's unannounced survival game has been canceled after spending more than half a decade in development. The move, which is bound to disappoint many of the company's fans, stems from Microsoft's massive layoffs that were disclosed earlier today.
Although Blizzard's survival game was only officially announced in January 2022, it is believed to have been in the pipeline for much longer than that. According to the LinkedIn profile of its director, Craig Amai, the project started development in July 2017, six and a half years ago. A good chunk of that time was ostensibly spent in pre-production, but an uptick in the company's hiring for the game suggested that the work on the mysterious title has been ramping up in the 2021-2023 period.
Despite those efforts, the newly emerged report of the large-scale layoffs at Microsoft's gaming divisions reveals that Blizzard's long-running project has been canceled. Matt Booty, Microsoft's president of game content and studios, was quoted as saying that some of the staff will be transferred to other unannounced Blizzard games that are presently in early stages of development. Everyone else will join the list of approximately 1,900 employees that Microsoft now plans to lay off across its gaming divisions. Industry insider Jason Schreier subsequently clarified that the project, code-named Odyssey, was «many years away» from completion.
That revelation runs contrary to some of the recent fan speculation that Blizzard's survival game was nearing the finish line. Although AAA development cycles have been growing longer on a generational basis, six and a half years is still an uncharacteristically long time for such a project, and one that implies Blizzard's survival game might have been going through development hell.
Odyssey was many years away from being done.
While big-business M&A deals often lead to the kind of redundancies that Microsoft has just announced, that is not to say that Odyssey's cancellation was expected; Blizzard was clearly still hiring staff for its survival game throughout 2023, well after it had agreed to the Microsoft acquisition and allowed the company to review its operations as part of its due diligence. In light of that activity, it is possible that the decision to axe the project even came as a surprise to its team, never mind industry watchers.
This turn of events marks the second AAA project cancellation in just as many months. The first one was announced back in mid-December, when Naughty Dog canceled The Last of Us multiplayer game following years of development, citing unwillingness to commit to supporting such a live service experience in the long term.
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Following the most recent round of layoffs from Microsoft's Xbox division, details about Blizzard's in-development survival game, Odyssey, have now leaked online. Microsoft first announced the major layoffs earlier this week, reporting that 1,900 employees from the company had lost their jobs as a result. The layoffs reportedly saw particularly heavy impact on Microsoft's gaming division, with Activision Blizzard, Xbox, and ZeniMax reportedly seeing the brunt of the layoffs. Now, one of the casualties of the layoffs comes as an in-development survival game from Blizzard.
Following the huge layoffs (over 1,900 employees) announced yesterday by Microsoft across teams at Blizzard and Xbox, it was also revealed that Blizzard's survival game Odyssey had been canceled.
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 a new report published by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has shed more light on what brought about the highly anticipated project’s cancellation.
In early 2023, it was revealed that Blizzard had been working on a completely brand-new survival game based on an original IP. It was later rumored that the game would be called Odyssey and would feature a "cartoony" art style similar to that of Overwatch. It was all very exciting, especially since Activision Blizzard is almost allergic to experimenting with new IP these days, but unfortunately, we'll never actually get to play Odyssey.