Activision Blizzard Cancels Unannounced Survival Game After Microsoft Layoffs

thegamer.com:

In early 2023, it was revealed that Blizzard had been working on a completely brand-new survival game based on an original IP. It was later rumored that the game would be called Odyssey and would feature a "cartoony" art style similar to that of Overwatch. It was all very exciting, especially since Activision Blizzard is almost allergic to experimenting with new IP these days, but unfortunately, we'll never actually get to play Odyssey.

Earlier today, Microsoft systematically began laying off over 1,900 employees, heavily impacting its gaming division and Activision Blizzard in particular. According to an internal memo seen by The Verge, these changes have several employees being shifted around to "several promising projects" within the company, most of which were previously working on Odyssey, which has reportedly been canceled by Microsoft after six years of development.

Now we just need to find out the reason why. According to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, there are a variety of different things, but a lot of them came down to internal issues with the game's engine. In a new report, Schreier claims that Blizzard decided to use an engine called Synapse that had previously been developed for mobile titles, but this caused development to be much slower than if the devs had just used Unreal Engine.

The reason for using Synapse instead of Unreal Engine was apparently due to the complex systems that would've been included in Odyssey, as well as its difficulties supporting large open maps with up to 100 player support.

Following Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, many on the team working on Odyssey had hoped it could switch engines to Unreal, even though it was still years away from release. Schreier even claims that there were hopes at Blizzard that the Odyssey team could be greatly expanded to get the game ready for an "overly optimistic" 2026 release, but were ultimately told the project would be scrapped altogether as the Synapse engine wasn't