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Blizzard today canceled survival game Odyssey and laid off most of the team. It was in development for more than six years — and by all accounts very fun — but was still years away from release. Why? Because of Synapse, the engine behind the game. Story: https://t.co/P1Y7Nh3G5m
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) January 25, 2024
Despite the additional resources, the project struggled largely due to technical issues surrounding the engine, or the suite of tools and technology that developers use to construct a game, according to people familiar with the process. Odyssey was originally prototyped on the popular Unreal Engine, from Epic Games Inc., but Blizzard executives decided to switch, in part, because it wouldn’t support their ambitions for vast maps supporting up to 100 players at once.
Blizzard instead directed the Odyssey team to use Synapse, an internal engine that the company had originally developed for mobile games and envisioned as something that would be shared across many of its projects. But that led to significant problems as the technology was slow to coalesce, and Odyssey’s artists instead spent time prototyping content in the Unreal Engine that they knew would have to be discarded later, said the people.
When the Microsoft acquisition was finalized, some Blizzard staff were hopeful that they might be able to switch back to Unreal Engine rather than trying to finish the game on Synapse. In an interview at BlizzCon in November, Ybarra said that their new parent company would offer them the freedom to use the technology of their choice without having to go through the board of directors as in the past.
“The tech leaders will decide what the engines are,” he said.
Despite the challenges, Odyssey appeared to be making progress. People who played early versions of the game enjoyed it and thought there was a lot of potential in the market for a survival game that hit Blizzard’s bar for quality. Still, Odyssey was years away from completion. At one point, Blizzard was looking to expand the team to hundreds of people in hopes of targeting a 2026 release, but even that seemed overly optimistic to some developers.
Instead, the project was canceled as the company concluded that Synapse was not ready for production.
