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.
Would you have liked to play Odyssey? Tell us what you think of this decision down below.
Comments 5
It sounds like another game where an in-house engine has caused issues - Anthem, Halo Infinite and even Starfield are other examples.
The report says even adding hundreds more developers in the hope of a 2026 release seemed unrealistic - so we'd likely have been talking of doubling or tripling the development team for a potential 2027 or 2028 release date.
4 or 5 years of exorbitant costs on an unknown new IP (which has already had 6 years of expenditure) that sits in an over-saturated sector of the market (survival games) does seem a huge risk - so I can see why it was cancelled, no matter how promising it seemed.
The developers may look back in a few years and think differently - nearly all teams think what they're on currently is great (unless an external supplier is involved / you're forced to compromise too much, in which case you blame them!) but in hindsight years later you can re-visit and think "what on earth was I thinking, why did we do that that way?!".
The biggest surprise to me though is letting the team go - surely re-deploying them within Microsoft Gaming would have been a better answer...
Really hope everyone lands on their feet and is able to find work fast
@Widey85 I hope you’re not advocating for every game to be made with Unreal, I don’t want to live in that world. Besides, I’ve seen what Ark is like in UE5… And while Studio Wildcard have proven time and time again that they’re not the most technically proficient developers, survival games are typically demanding anyway.
@InheritNegative No there's definitely a place for open-source engines, and even Unity (when they're not being dumb) - and for in-house engines when they're built by specialists.
Ubisoft's one is a good example - AC Valhalla, WD Legion and Far Cry 6 all looked good on both last gen and this gen, and have insane draw distances and pretty foliage etc.
The Forza Tech engine is another good example, with FH5 looking amazing, so is id's engine, and so are the Decima / in-house Sony engines.
It's when a developer attempts to use an engine that isn't suited to the game type (Frostbite for Anthem for example) or an engine that's now out of date: SlipSpace for Halo Infinite for example is pretty and allows for great Forge tools, but is apparently a nightmare to develop in now, and the Creation engine is prettier in Starfield but causes all those annoying loading screens as it can't really handle modern open worlds well.
It's more a "right tool for the right job" situation - in this instance they were trying to use an engine for mobile games and develop it further, which then becomes a nightmare as you can end up with one team changing the engine while another team is building the game on it and has to constantly adapt to the changes.
It's quite a different situation if the developer is a specialist in the engine like Playground Games, who understand it so well they can coordinate the changes properly
I would've expected nothing less than fantastic from Blizzard. They are my favorite development studio.
No telling how far it was away from release though. Blizzard is not known for short development times. Diablo IV came 11 years after Diablo III. A new IP might be a 20 year process at Blizzard. LOL
If it is fantastic there must be a way to let gamers have a little taste and see if it can go somewhere?
I mean, that’s a lot of dev time!
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