Why Blizzard Canceled Odyssey Revealed | Atomics

A series of unfortunate news was announced today for Xbox and Blizzard. It wasn’t just revealed that 1,900 employees in Microsoft’s gaming division will be laid off The OdysseyA project is responsible for Overwatch They were working for six years, it was cancelled. Although no reason was offered for this decision, A new report gives us the insight that led companies to this conclusion.

Recently, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier had a chance to find out what’s going on with current and former Blizzard employees. The Odyssey. Let us remember that this title started its development in 2017, but two years ago the project was not made known to the public, and Its proposal was a survival game, similar Minecraft y the rust. At the end of the day, the decision to cancel this project was the result of multiple problems with the chosen graphics engine.

Basically, The Odyssey It was planned using Unreal Engine, Epic Games’ popular graphics engine. However, the equipment provided here was not enough for the studio’s ambitions, as they wanted to create a huge game capable of hosting 100 players at the same time. Thus, The directors indicated that this project should be an internal engine of the company Synapse.

However, Synapse was anything but the best for what it was The Odyssey Could have been. This graphics engine was conceived for mobile games and as something that will be shared across many of your projects. It was precisely this that created significant problems, since the technology took some time to make sense to developers.And the title’s artists spent time prototyping content in Unreal Engine that they knew would have to be scrapped later.

After Microsoft’s acquisition, Blizzard director Mike Ybarra mentioned during an interview at BlizzCon in November last year that their parent company, that is, Microsoft, would give them the freedom to work with whatever technology they wanted, without requiring it. Board of Directors must face. Thus, Its team The Odyssey I was hoping to leave Synapse behind and get back to working on Unreal Engine.

Despite the positive results in recent months, those who have come to play The Odyssey They noted that while the title was fun, the game was still far from reality. At that time, a team of 100 people came to work on the project and Blizzard even mentioned that They wanted to significantly increase the number of employees to meet the expected launch of 2026Something that many didn’t think was possible.

However, today we know that this story does not have a positive ending. The Odyssey Abolished, and Those who worked on the title noted that this decision was a result of using Synapse, which was not ready to go into production at this time. When asked, a Blizzard representative Andrew Reynolds commented:

“As difficult as making these decisions can be, experimentation and risk-taking are part of Blizzard’s history and creative process. Ideas seep into other games or, in some cases, become games of their own. Starting something completely new in video games is one of the most difficult tasks and we are extremely grateful to all the talented people who supported this project.”

As a result of the changes Microsoft announced today, some employees will lose their jobs, while others will be reassigned to projects that are in the early stages of development. This is a case where the directors chose to scrap the project, Instead of constantly spending on something they weren’t sure when it would hit the market. Undoubtedly, a sad loss for Blizzard. On a related topic, you can learn more about Microsoft gaming layoffs here.

Editor’s note:

This was a case where the scale of the project was so large that Microsoft and Blizzard chose to cancel the project rather than continue spending money on it. It was speculated that the title would be available in 2026, but it was likely to be delayed. On this occasion, it seemed that everything was against The Odyssey.

Through: Bloomberg