Blizzard’s survival game has reportedly been canceled after 6 years in development due to engine issues

According to a new report, Blizzard Entertainment’s survival game, which was informally announced in 2022, has been canceled due to engine issues during its six-year development period Bloomberg Report. This report follows yesterday’s news that Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax divisions. Alongside this news, Blizzard President Mike Ybarra also announced that he was leaving the company, and we learned that the aforementioned survival game had been canceled.

However, Blizzard did not elaborate on why the game, which was announced just two years earlier, was canceled. Bloomberg’s New report details development issues surrounding the game’s engine, which was prototyped using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine before “Blizzard executives decided to switch, in part because it would undermine their ambitions for massive maps that support up to 100 players at a time.” wouldn’t support.”

The team behind this game, that Bloomberg called Odyssey, switched to Synapse, an internal engine that Blizzard originally developed for mobile games and “which was intended as something that would be shared across many of its projects.”

This reportedly caused significant problems in Odyssey’s development. When Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for a whopping $69 billion last year, the team was apparently hoping that their new owners would allow the switch back to Unreal Engine. However, this change did not take place.

Bloomberg notes that despite problems with the engine, the game’s development has progressed, with people who played early versions of it enjoying it, pointing to its potential in a landscape where survival games are as popular as they are. Just this week, early access Pokémon With Guns survival game Palworld surpassed 8 million on Steam in just six days, and those numbers don’t include players playing on Xbox and PC Game Pass.

Blizzard reportedly wanted to expand the Odyssey team to target a 2026 release year for the survival game, but Bloomberg reports: “Even that seemed overly optimistic to some developers.” And now, as we officially know, development is complete and the once exciting Blizzard game has been canceled.

Be sure too Read the full text Bloomberg report for even more details.

Read more about Microsoft’s heartbreaking layoffs yesterday, which left 1,900 people unemployed. In just 26 days in 2024, there were more than 5,500 layoffs, accounting for more than half of all layoffs in 2023.

(Source: Bloomberg)

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