Blizzard Leisure's survival recreation, <a href="https://www.gameinformer.com/2022/01/25/blizzard-announces-new-survival-game-in-all-new-universe">which it informally introduced in 2022</a>, was reportedly canceled over engine points throughout its six years of improvement, in response to a brand new <em><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/information/articles/2024-01-25/microsoft-cancels-big-new-blizzard-game-after-six-years-of-development?utm_source=google&utm_medium=bd&cmpId=google&embedded-checkout=true">Bloomberg</a> </em>report. This report follows yesterday's information that <a href="https://www.gameinformer.com/2022/01/25/blizzard-announces-new-survival-game-in-all-new-universe">Microsoft is shedding 1,900 staff</a> throughout its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax divisions. Alongside this information, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra additionally introduced he was departing from the corporate, and we discovered the aforementioned survival recreation had been canceled.
Nonetheless, Blizzard didn’t actually contact on why the sport it had simply introduced precisely two years prior was canceled. Bloomberg’s new report particulars improvement struggles across the recreation’s engine, which was prototyped utilizing Epic Video games’ Unreal Engine earlier than “Blizzard executives determined to modify, partially, as a result of it wouldn’t assist their ambitions for huge maps supporting as much as 100 gamers without delay.”
The workforce behind this recreation, which Bloomberg says was referred to as Odyssey, switched to Synapse, an in-house engine Blizzard initially developed for cellular video games and “envisioned as one thing that might be shared throughout a lot of its initiatives.”
This reportedly led to vital issues in Odyssey’s improvement. When Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard final yr for a colossal $69 billion, the workforce had apparently hoped their new house owners would permit it to modify again to Unreal Engine. Nonetheless, that change didn’t occur.
Bloomberg notes that regardless of engine struggles, the sport’s improvement made progress, with individuals who performed early variations of it having fun with it, remarking on its potential in a panorama the place survival video games are as standard as they’re. Simply this week, Early Entry ‘Pokémon With Weapons” survival recreation Palworld crossed 8 million copies offered on Steam in simply six days, and people numbers don’t embrace gamers enjoying by Xbox and PC Sport Cross.
Blizzard was reportedly seeking to develop the Odyssey workforce in an effort to focus on a 2026 launch yr for the survival recreation, however Bloomberg reviews “even that appeared overly optimistic to some builders.” And now, as we formally know, improvement has concluded and the as soon as thrilling Blizzard recreation canceled.
Make sure to learn the complete Bloomberg report for much more particulars.
For extra, examine Microsoft’s heartbreaking layoffs from yesterday, which have left 1,900 folks jobless. At simply 26 days into 2024, there have been greater than 5,500 layoffs, which is greater than half of the whole layoffs of 2023.
[Source: Bloomberg]
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