Yesterday, we all got the news that Blizzard's long-in-development survival game Odyssey had been cancelled as part of Microsoft's huge round of Xbox layoffs. Odyssey had been in development in some form since 2017, and development was seemingly progressing well despite some issues with the game's engine.
In response to the news of its cancellation, former Blizzard dev Johnny Cash (not that one), said that this survival game "was fantastic", and that it's "our collective loss" that we'll never get to play it.
Meanwhile over at Bloomberg, reporter Jason Schreier has dropped some other juicy details on Odyssey and its development. The team was building a brand-new universe with the title, and its survival style was compared to Minecraft and Rust. Apparently, roughly 150 people were working on the project when it got cancelled - and the game was "making progress" despite some development hurdles.
According to Schreier, the team's decision to use its own 'Synapse' technology meant that development was often slower than it needed to be - and the team had considered using Unreal Engine at a certain point. Ultimately Blizzard stuck with Synapse until this week's cancellation of the entire project.
As per Matt Booty's statement on the layoffs, Blizzard has "several promising new projects" in the "early stages of development", but Odyssey will no longer be one of those projects. As we've continued to express with all of this news, we hope that everyone who was working on Odyssey lands on their feet and finds success elsewhere - whether it's with Blizzard or another studio.