It has now come to light that Blizzard made a common mistake game studios do that led to the cancellation of their upcoming title, Odyssey.
Odyssey was publicly announced in January 2022, and was described as a survival game inspired by Rust and Minecraft. The title was to launch another new universe, in the same vein as Overwatch.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Odyssey’s staff only found out they were going to be fired yesterday, and it’s possible that the 100 member team working on the game were let go.
Bloomberg’s sources shared more details on Odyssey’s behind the scenes development. Their sources claimed that the company started work on the project on Unreal Engine, but changed their mind in the middle of development.
This is because Unreal Engine wouldn’t work to create vast maps that could hold as many as 100 players at the same time. For this reason, they decided to switch to an internal Blizzard engine called Synapse.
Now, we are not claiming that all games have to be made on Unreal. There are many cases where Unreal really does not support the developer’s goals. It is frequently correct for studios to transition to other engines, or to make their own, to enable the features that they want.
However, we have also frequently read stories of multiple games that turned out poorly, or got cancelled in development, after a game company decided to move away from Unreal Engine. Some developers will call this a negative, but for the most part, Unreal is the top game engine in the industry today.
Blizzard’s final decision to cancel Odyssey came because they decided that Synapse would also not be good enough to meet the studio’s goals.
It can also be difficult for studios to transition into Unreal Engine, but its advantages are unmistakable. For example, Tekken Team found it prohibitively expensive to port Tekken Tag Tournament 2 out of PlayStation 3, to the Xbox 360 and Wii U. They used multiple middleware, such as Havok, to make the transition possible.
Today, Tekken 8 is built on Unreal, and Tekken Team has learned all they need to master the engine. As a result, this game is seamlessly releasing simultaneously across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows via Steam. Switching to Unreal made Tekken 7 their best-selling title for some time, and the studio is poised to repeat that trick for Tekken 8.
Unfortunately, Odyssey is joining that list of cancelled games, that will never realize their potential. GameRanx wishes Blizzard’s outgoing employees the best, and we hope they can find placement back into the video game industry.
