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.
Blizzard had first discussed the game around two years ago when they said they were working on a survival game set in a brand new fantasy universe. Shortly afterward, it was revealed that Odyssey included first-person view. The news ignited interest from the company’s large fanbase; after all, Blizzard has always strived to take a new game concept or genre and make it more accessible and polished than ever before, as they did with World of Warcraft or, more recently, with Overwatch. On the other hand, survival games tend to be rather rough since they have been historically made by indie developers with little to no budget. Many players hoped Blizzard could fix that.
However, according to Jason Schreier, Odyssey encountered a lot of troubles during its development phase. The original pitch came from Craig Amai, former Lead Quest Designer on World of WarCraft: Warlords of Draenor, back in 2017. Prototyping started on the Unreal Engine, but Blizzard executives reportedly forced a switch to the company’s in-house Synapse engine, which was originally created for mobile game development. The switch happened because the Odyssey team had trouble adapting the Unreal Engine to ‘vast maps that supported up to 100 players at once’. This part is, however, a bit dubious, seeing as the signature Unreal Engine game (Fortnite) notoriously supports 100 players in its Battle Royale mode. Moreover, plenty of game developers have adapted the engine to even larger player counts and maps.
In any case, the Odyssey team struggled even more with Synapse. According to Schreier’s sources, the developers were hoping Microsoft, the new owner of Activision Blizzard, would approve a return to Unreal Engine. Early playtests seemed to be successful, although the development would likely have taken until 2026, if not even longer. However, it was concluded that Synapse was not ready for production, which led to the cancellation of Odyssey.
It’s not the first time Blizzard has canceled a game. The public already knows about Starcraft: Ghost, the console stealth action game that got indefinitely postponed in 2006, and Titan, the MMO shooter that was canceled in 2014. Some of Titan’s assets and concepts eventually made it into Overwatch; it’ll be interesting to see if the same happens with Odyssey.
