In early 2023, it was revealed that Blizzard had been working on a completely brand-new survival game based on ✤an original IP. It was later rumored that the game would be called Odyssey and would fea🔥ture a ♔"cartoony" art style similar to that of Overwatch. It was all very eꩵxciting, especially since Activision Blizzard is almost allergic to experimenting with new IP these days, but unfortunately, we'll never actually get to play Odyssey.
Earlier today, Micros𒐪oft systematically began laying off💟 over 1,900 employees, heavily impacting its gaming division and Activision Blizzard in particular. According to an internal memo seen by , these changes have several employees being shifted around to "several promising projects" within the com♓pany, most of which were previously working on Odyssey, which has reportedly been canceled by Microsoft after six years of development.
Now we just need to find out the reason why. Accordin🎃g to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, there are a variety of different things, but a lot of them came down to internal issues with the game's engine. , Schreier claims that Blizzard decided to use an engine called Synapse that had previously been developed for mobile titles, but this caused development to be much slower than if the devs had just used Unreal Engine.
The reason for using Synapse ﷽instead of Unreal Engine was apparently due to the complex systems that would've been included in Odyssey, as we𓄧ll as its difficulties supporting large open maps with up to 100 player support.
Following Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, many on the team working on Odyssey had🔯 hoped it could switch engines to Unreal, even though it was still years away from release. Schreier even claims that there were hopes at Blizzard that the Odyssey team could be greatly expanded to get the game read൩y for an "overly optimistic" 2026 release, but were ultimately told the project would be scrapped altogether as the Synapse engine wasn't ready for production.
It's a rather sad state of affairs, especially with the layoffs on top of all this, and a worrying sign regarding Activision Blizzard's output besides anything other than already established franchises such as Call of Duty and Overwatch. Hopefully, those working on the title and are still at Activision Blizzard will ꦑbe shifted to new and interesting projects, rather than be made to serve in the Call of Duty mines for the rest of their work💫ing lives.
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