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Blizzard’s untitled survival game, codenamed Odyssey, has reportedly been canceled, along with president Mike Ybarra announcing his departure. This comes shortly after Microsoft announced that it would be cutting 1,900 jobs across Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax, and Xbox.
According to an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Microsoft Gaming Content and Studios president Matt Booty said, “As part of this focus, Blizzard is ending development on its survival game project and will be shifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development.”
A report from Bloomberg sheds more light on what happened with the survival game, known as Odyssey. It was originally in development using Unreal Engine, which presented certain challenges, and was later changed to an internal engine, Synapse. That led to new problems, and ultimately the project has now been canceled despite some reported positivity about the early version of the game, which was still years away from release.
Ybarra announced his resignation from Microsoft on Twitter/X and said that he would offer help to anyone impacted by its layoffs. He spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, leaving for Blizzard in 2019. He then briefly became part of Microsoft once again when its merger with Activision Blizzard finalized last year. Additionally, Blizzard founder and chief design officer Allen Adham has reportedly left as well.
The untitled survival game was teased back in 2022 and served mainly as a recruitment tool for developers to come and work on it. It was going to be Blizzard’s first new IP in six years since Overwatch in 2016 and has also reportedly been in development for more than six years.
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