What we knew about Blizzard’s now-dead survival game, Odyssey

The history of Blizzard’s game development includes a graveyard full of titles that never made it to launch, including the likes of Starcraft Ghost, Warcraft Adventures, and Project Titan. This week another game was interred in this somber place as Odyssey was laid to rest following the huge layoffs at Activision-Blizzard.

Odyssey wasn’t much of a known quantity for many gamers, as Blizzard barely spoke of it following an early 2022 announcement that it was working on a survival game set in a brand-new IP.

“We are going on a journey to a whole new universe, home to a brand-new survival game for PC and console. A place full of heroes we have yet to meet, stories yet to be told, and adventures yet to be lived. A vast realm of possibility, waiting to be explored,” the studio said at the time.

But now that Odyssey is cancelled and most of its team let go from the studio, some details about this project have surfaced. Bloomberg reports that over 100 people were working on this title for six years now and that Blizzard saw Odyssey as one of the titles that “held the most promise for future growth.”

Odyssey was conceived in 2017 from former World of Warcraft Lead Quest Designer Craig Amai as a way to pick up ideas from Minecraft and Rust and run with them in a new direction. The project itself struggled with technical limitations, especially in regard to the disliked Synapse game engine, to create “vast maps” that held 100 people or more. Bloomberg said that the game was still “years away” at this point, however.

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