Panic has announced that its Playdate handheld is back in stock and available to purchase “for a limited time”.
26.01.2024 - 11:37 / videogameschronicle.com / Mike Ybarra / Matt Booty / Tom Ivan / Allen Adham
Fresh details about Blizzard’s cancelled survival game have been revealed.
On Thursday, Microsoft announced that plans to lay off 1,900 staff across Xbox, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard.
Alongside the news, it was confirmed that Blizzard’s 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 Bloomberg’s sources.
Staff were only informed of its cancellation on Thursday, and it’s 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, Microsoft’s game content and studios president, Matt Booty, said the company would be “shifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development”.
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 Epic’s Unreal Engine, Blizzard executives felt the technology wasn’t the right fit because it wouldn’t 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, it’s 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.
“As difficult as making these decisions are, experimentation and risk taking are part of Blizzard’s history and the creative process,” Blizzard spokesman Andrew 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.”
Panic has announced that its Playdate handheld is back in stock and available to purchase “for a limited time”.
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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.
Blizzard Entertainment's survival game, which it informally announced in 2022, was reportedly canceled over engine issues during its six years of development, according to a new Bloomberg report. This report follows yesterday's news that Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax divisions. Alongside this news, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra also announced he was departing from the company, and we learned the aforementioned survival game had been canceled.
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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.
The development team behind Blizzard's now-cancelled survival game, reportedly called Odyssey, is seemingly among the teams dramatically impacted by the layoffs at Microsoft today.