Blizzard Survival Game Canceled

gamerant.com:

Blizzard's unannounced survival game has been canceled after spending more than half a decade in development. The move, which is bound to disappoint many of the company's fans, stems from Microsoft's massive layoffs that were disclosed earlier today.

Although Blizzard's survival game was only officially announced in January 2022, it is believed to have been in the pipeline for much longer than that. According to the LinkedIn profile of its director, Craig Amai, the project started development in July 2017, six and a half years ago. A good chunk of that time was ostensibly spent in pre-production, but an uptick in the company's hiring for the game suggested that the work on the mysterious title has been ramping up in the 2021-2023 period.

Despite those efforts, the newly emerged report of the large-scale layoffs at Microsoft's gaming divisions reveals that Blizzard's long-running project has been canceled. Matt Booty, Microsoft's president of game content and studios, was quoted as saying that some of the staff will be transferred to other unannounced Blizzard games that are presently in early stages of development. Everyone else will join the list of approximately 1,900 employees that Microsoft now plans to lay off across its gaming divisions. Industry insider Jason Schreier subsequently clarified that the project, code-named Odyssey, was «many years away» from completion.

That revelation runs contrary to some of the recent fan speculation that Blizzard's survival game was nearing the finish line. Although AAA development cycles have been growing longer on a generational basis, six and a half years is still an uncharacteristically long time for such a project, and one that implies Blizzard's survival game might have been going through development hell.

Odyssey was many years away from being done.

While big-business M&A deals often lead to the kind of redundancies that Microsoft has just announced, that is not to say that Odyssey's cancellation was expected; Blizzard was