Blizzard’s ‘Unannounced Survival Game’ was cancelled due to technical issues with game engine

26 January, 2024

Concept art for Blizzard's untitled survival game, Project Odyssey

Details about Blizzard’s Unannounced Survival Game have been revealed following its cancellation yesterday (January 25).

First announced at the start of 2022, Blizzard’s new survival game was set to be the first new IP from the studio since 2016’s Overwatch.

“Blizzard is embarking on our next quest,” said the studio during a recruitment drive. “We are going on a journey to a whole new universe, home to a brand-new survival game for PC and console. A place full of heroes we have yet to meet, stories yet to be told, and adventures yet to be lived. A vast realm of possibility, waiting to be explored.”

Apart from two pieces of concept art showing modern-day humans in a fantasy land, nothing else from Project Odyssey was ever made public and yesterday, the game was cancelled while many of the developers working on it were let go as part of huge swathe of lay-offs at the company.

It’s now been revealed that work on the survival game had actually begun in 2018. Initially, it had been created using Epic’s Unreal Engine but according to Blomberg, execs wanted to use their own, in-house engine Synapse that had been created for mobile games and not the vast scale of Odyssey. The game was then cancelled when it was discovered that the tech was not production ready and couldn’t keep up with the demands of the survival game.

“As difficult as making these decisions are, experimentation and risk taking are part of Blizzard’s history and the creative process,” Blizzard spokesperson Andrew Reynolds told Blomberg (via PCGamer). “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.”

In a internal memo, Microsoft studio 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,” but it seems a majority of developers working on Blizzard’s survival game have been let go, including game director Craig Amai.

Posting on LinkedIn, Amai wrote: “If you’re looking for talent, the crew coming out of the Unannounced Survival Game are abnormally high quality – I cannot recommend them enough.”

Following the news of the layoffs, fans have been sharing former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata’s view on firing staff as a short-term solution to financial difficulties.

“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world,” he said after taking a 50 per cent pay cut to avoid firing staff following the failure of the Wii U.

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