It's all the Synapse engine's fault: the cancellation of Blizzard's ambitious survival simulator is due to a misguided request from company management

Yesterday it Media: Blizzard has cancelled development of an ambitious survival simulator that hasn't even had an official title yet from Blizzard.

The news caused a great surprise, because recently the developers announced the recruitment of new employees in the team that works on the project Odyssey.

Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier shared the information he knows about Blizzard's survival simulator and shed light on the situation.

Here's What We Know

According to Schreier, Odyssey has been in development for over six years with the help of 100 experienced Blizzard employees.

The idea for the game belonged to Blizzard veteran Craig Amai, who worked on World of Warcraft.

The game based on a brand new universe had a lot of potential and received good reviews from test participants.

According to Jason Schreier, the main reason for the cancellation of Odyssey is technical difficulties. The fact is that the game was originally created on the Unreal Engine, but at some point Blizzard management demanded that the development team use the internal Synapse engine, which is usually used in the creation of mobile games.

For the sake of argument, Blizzard's directors claimed that Synapse would help create maps that could hold more than a hundred players at once. And once Synapse started to be used - the gem designers were convinced that it was not suitable for such a project, but were forced to continue working with the technology.

Employees were hoping that after Blizzard becomes part of Microsoft this wrong decision would be reversed and they could go back to Unreal Engine, but that, as we learned yesterday, is not going to happen. The game is cancelled completely, some employees will be transferred to other "more promising" © projects and some employees will be laid off among the 1900 employees of Microsoft Gaming.

So sadly ended the story of a promising game, which was ruined by unwise decisions of the management.

Recall, yesterday it became known about the dismissal of Blizzard president Mike Ybarra.

Source: Bloomberg