The maker of many hit games, including
World of Warcraft and
Diablo IV, has mostly focused on its large, existing franchises. But in recent years, the company made a big investment in
Odyssey, building up a team of more than 100 people to develop it. The game, set in a new universe, was in development for more than six years and outlasted
many other Blizzard incubation projects. Now, the future of such efforts outside of existing franchises is uncertain.
In a statement, Blizzard spokesman Andrew Reynolds said the game’s development had ended “as part of a focus on projects that hold the most promise for future growth” and that the company would “move some of the people on the team to one of several exciting new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development.”
Odyssey started in 2017 as a pitch from Craig Amai, a Blizzard veteran who worked on
World of Warcraft. It was conceived as a survival game, like
Minecraft and
Rust, but with more polish and fewer bugs. In subsequent years, the team working on the game expanded, and it was
announced publicly in 2022 as the company began hiring more staff.
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.