Jason Schreier (Bloomberg): Blizzard Cancels Big New Game After Six Years of Development
- Thread starter Shirke
- Start date
- News Microsoft Activision/Blizzard
That is the sad part - it sounds like the game could have actually ended up being something good. Why is it so common for management to make engine development decisions when they have clearly no understanding of how development works?
engines cost money! here, use our shitty unsupported mobile engine instead so we don't have to pay licensing fees
Cross-posting this form the other thread, but the switch from UE4 to an in-house engine over concerns regarding a large scale map and large player counts is just a massive missed call from Blizzard.
UE4 actually wasn't great at that aspect around the time that they initially started to pitch and prototype this! But then due to two little games coming out that year, Epic quickly started to develop the engine in a direction to make it better at that exact scenario!
UE4 actually wasn't great at that aspect around the time that they initially started to pitch and prototype this! But then due to two little games coming out that year, Epic quickly started to develop the engine in a direction to make it better at that exact scenario!
What games? I know they're probably obvious but I don't know lmao
Sadly executive meddling is always a thing. Their choices seemed to be either scaling back their vision to work with what they had or changing engines to try and get everything. Reading through, it's fairly obvious that they should have listened to the devs and scaled back instead of doing what they did.
It's better to have smaller co-op and expand it later if possible than to derail everything and chase the dream.
The studio basically got screwed by Kotik and his c-suite goons.
The irony is they couldn't have known that it would go that way at the time.
The reason that they didn't go with Unreal is because Unreal couldn't handle 100 players on one map. Fortnite and PUBG both happened not soon after (of which Fortnite Epic is directly responsible for).
This industry is beyond fucked. What happened after PS360 era? Tons of studios just forgot how to produce games?
Six years, damn. What a waste.
Six years, damn. What a waste.
Another project dead in the water because of higher-up meddling. Sure, back when the project was first conceived UE might not have been the best for huge 100 player maps, but things quickly changed over the years thanks to Fortnite. They had plenty of time to switch back to UE, but it's clear that the higher-ups wanted them to use the shitty new internal mobile game engine.
And now all those devs are jobless because of it. What an absolutely massive fuck up, and I'm sure the people most responsible will go on like nothing happened.
And now all those devs are jobless because of it. What an absolutely massive fuck up, and I'm sure the people most responsible will go on like nothing happened.
As per Jason's article, a 2026 release date, if everything went smooth, would have equaled an 8 year development cycle.
100% not sustainable. And for me this speaks to just how messed up AB was pre-merger. Executive meddling, Bobby, and his c-suite punks strike again.
100% not sustainable. And for me this speaks to just how messed up AB was pre-merger. Executive meddling, Bobby, and his c-suite punks strike again.
PUBG and Fortnite.
PUBG was on UE4 because the development team (Bluehole, now Krafton) only really knew UE, so they worked with Epic to customize the engine into making a 100 player multiplayer game on a large map work. Epic was working on a long suffering and mocked small scale survival co-op game called Fortnite, and as a testbed decided to upgrade the engine from the ground up with a new experimental mode called Fortnite Battle Royale, modeled after PUBG, which was now exploding in popularity.
A lot of Epic's subsequent upgrades to UE4 following that were centered handling that kind of that game better.
Never 4get
I got to play it at the first Blizzcon and had a really great time. The cancellation of Ghost still haunts me
Synapse sounds like the growing pains that EA and Frostbite had in the 2010's all over again.
that's some insane project mismanagement. i wonder who was so adamant about keeping it to 100 players and moving engines. how about 50 players, and you actually get to release a working game
I know folks are pointing to Kotick, who does bear responsibility, but from the article this sounds like Ybarra and his team made this decision. This level of mismanagement, plus who knows what other issues Microsoft found on the other develop teams, is probably why he is gone today. And the fact after the acquisition they tried to pass the buck back to Microsoft "well they can choose to go back to Unreal" is also an issue. This team was basically doomed to be axed once someone new got financial control over them it seems sadly due to those decisions.
I hope Blizzard can get back on track. Between Overwatch 2 PvE and now this, that's literal years of dev time and money that have essentially been tossed out.
I'm really sad we'll never see this game since it sounds like it was really well received internally. Hopefully they can pull a Project Titan out of it and scrap together the work that was done into a different game so that it doesn't all get tossed out.
I'm really sad we'll never see this game since it sounds like it was really well received internally. Hopefully they can pull a Project Titan out of it and scrap together the work that was done into a different game so that it doesn't all get tossed out.
That's the wrong way to make a survival game. You need a team of like 10 just putting out something insanely early and unpolished and then build it out alongside your community.
Bring on the leaks so we can all see some gameplay and add to the list yet another game that would have been cool to play but will never get the chance.
As a person with limited knowledge about game development, I understand why many developers opt for Unreal or Unity. Setting up the engine can be time-consuming. I recall Rod Fergusson mentioning in a podcast that the lengthy transition from UE4 to UE5 was a factor in his departure from The Coalition. Even for a company well-versed in Unreal, the process would take 18 additional months. This really highlights potential challenges with proprietary engines in a business context. They spent so many years with this survival game just to get the engine up to par and it sounds like it might not be.
There really was no fixing this situation from the sound of things.
Was it tho? One of the biggest complains I used to hear about UE4 last gen was how bad the engine dealt with big open world maps. Now, I'm not saying going with Synapse was the best decision, but at one point most of the games having bad performances last gen (when this game started its development) was caused by a flawn in UE4 itself.
Why the fuck do execs have the say on the game engine, they are tech team leads for that. Again a project fucked in the ass by clueless upper management.
Was this supposed to be on mobile? Wouldn't surprise me, dunno why else theyd use a mobile engine
fucking wild that executives chose to pivot to a mobile engine to get 100 player - like, what an insane management mess up. who does that.
Basically only multiplayer IPs and GAAS so MS can recoup their investment
Reminds me of the period where EA seemed to push all their teams to use Frostbite and all the pain that involved
Maybe tomayto, tomahto. But I believe the title got updated to specify Microsoft was the one to cancel Blizzard's Odyssey.
Microsoft Cancels New Blizzard Video Game After Six Years of Development
Microsoft Cancels New Blizzard Video Game After Six Years of Development
which executive decided an engine suited for mobile was the right choice for a 100 player survival game?
![00Quan[T]](/data/avatar/31681832007/115484-m.jpg){kind=avatar}
Yeah, this game wouldn't see the light of day for at least 5 more years.
it's not a convincing picture being painted — i mean that the project would have been on time or otherwise successful had they just gone with UE4. i wish Jason was more thorough with his reporting on topics like this.
but MS buying them will make them even better!
they bought them because there was a "your company's widespread harassment of its female employees just went public" sale at the old stonks store. they didn't think about it much beyond "buy big company, get more revenue"
I'm uncertain as to when the Rust mobile app launched, but maybe they wanted a way for players to maintain their base right from their phones, similarly to that app.
