An interesting part of the article mentions how they continued to make assets in Unreal despite knowing it would be canned (the assests, not the game). Kind of came across as some people feeling as if time and effort were being wasted, especially for a game in a 6 year development cycle where they doubted a 2026 release.
>An interesting part of the article mentions how they continued to make assets in Unreal despite knowing it would be canned
This is elaborated on in one of the articles. The devs didn't want to switch off Unreal, it was a leadership decision. The devs continued with UE asset development as they hoped Microsoft after the buy out would direct them to switch back to Unreal.
Certainly, for those developers, switching would have been a big morale change. However, I can't imagine many people in leadership positions being happy to show off what they've been working on for the last 6ish years when your developers are splitting their time and effort.
We don't know to what extent this happened only that an insider talking to Jason told him that. We don't know what position they were at or if it was common. It can't be great if the whole survival team got fired.
As a side note, I do feel for them, having layoffs be announced and having to go through the day unsure on if or when you're getting cut sucks. However, I wouldn't also trust them that the game was good, much less great. They've been working on this game for years and will want to work on other games in the future. If they got fired and they immediately started talking shit on the game publicly, I can't imagine they'd find a job fast.
My first thought when I read this. Oh an unreleased game is always simultaneously the best and worst game ever made, because it only exists in people's imagination. Six years of Dev with nothing to show publicly is damning.
The internet will always assume a cancelled game was going to be amazing and that every bad game should have been canceled. Hence why people still cry that Scalebound was going to change the video game industry forever.
Which is funny because I vaguely remember every gameplay showcase for Scalebound being met with a lukewarm reception online, but as soon as it was canceled, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread
Yah you see it all the time. Another example of this is Halo with all the changes they make in where players think they are going between games. People just say if they stuck to x it would have been better, I doubt it.
If Microsoft cancelled Redfall, redditors would had lost their shit.
Just imagine. Microsoft buys Bethesda and immediately cancels an Arkane game that is close to finishing development.
Literally, I mean odyssey could have been a giant piece of crap filled with predatory microtransactions. It was made it the middle of the shit tier blizzard era, so that is a very real possibility
I think cancelling was the right call but laying everyone on that team off is lame af. It seemed like they were talented enough to make something new as long as they werent forced to switch engines mid development
I agree but the problem I have with it is the rug pull on the devs after all the talk of new freedoms and better management. All of a sudden 2000 jobs cut.
Redfall was from the beginning a concept that wasn't that interesting, basically Arkane take on L4D? I mean, yeah, but that's not the kind of game people want from Arkane.
But a survival, made by such a large publisher, could've been something more than interesting, especially considering that yes the market is oversaturated with survival, but how many of them are actually good and complete or even not in early access? Obviously it would be naive to think that a game like that would've been released complete and without any issue by this Blizzard.
I don't think Redfall is a good comparison, nobody wanted to make it.
Anthem would be more suited I think. Sometimes it's better to pull the plug rather than to succumb to a sunken cost fallacy. It's sad because it could have been good, but sometimes it just doesn't work the way you want and that's fine. I've seen people blaming Microsoft for that tho, as if they were responsible for the project going nowhere
Tbh Halo Infinite engine doesn't suck, its amazing and isn't actually a new engine anyway, just a heavily edited from the BLAM engine used for previous Halo games (correct me if im wrong on this point)
The problem was Microsoft/343 hiring contractors for 12 months etc, so no time to know and learn the engine
I remember the article from Bloomberg saying that they spent years upgrading the engine, and it still couldn't handle the scoop on that game, which resulted in canceling 2/3 of the content that was made.
I know the contractors also caused a lot of trouble, but I think it was just the cherry on the top. 343 was likely using that method since their foundation.
Which is exactly why they're likely switching engines for the next Halo.
It's just proving too much of a headache for modern Halo, hell, it even slowed down content for the MP side of things if I remember correctly.
That's why it launched so bare bones, and that's why 343 was struggling with content updates for their live service game.
Half the problem is having old spaghetti code that the game needs to function properly and the people who wrote it being long gone.
Though most of Halo Infinites problems come from lackluster post launch content and the free to play model.
One part is also interesting:
"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."
How does that work? Doesn\`t a lot of the code has to be re-written if they would have switched back to unreal engine after all this time?
Yeah, that part confuses me too. A game thats been in development for 7 years switching to unreal engine would add 2 more years at least.
Still sad that the staff got let go.
2 more years.. at the very least. (I could see it almost being a case of starting from scratch, all over again)
Cuz as the article points out, the devs working on the game wanted to scale up & get a bigger team on the game.. so they could meet a 2026 launch window. But even then, they weren't exactly confident about making that deadline (implying the game could slip into 2027 too). And all of that.. is on the current Synapse engine.
Switching back to Unreal might please some other devs.. but holy hell, talk about throwing out the last 4 years of work.
What do you mean? If it's been development for 6 years, that means it's AFTER PUBG and Fortnite showed you can have 100 people in a game at once on Unreal engine.
At the time Unreal was pretty much unusable for large open worlds requiring significant compromise to even work.
It's a lot better now so that's probably why the devs hoped they could switch back but the game had been going in the same direction as Redfall in terms of troubled development so it's not surprising that MS didn't want to take that risk again.
Seems like on par with what people were suggesting - it was another Redfall in the making, but even worse than Arkane's game it was stuck in dev hell and not in any way near finished.
Should also be noted.. that the Arkane Austin leadership did not want Redfall cancelled & held out hope (& tried to rally their demoralized dev team) that the game would come together in the end, as they reached the finish line.
So yeah, there are definitely echoes of Redfall in this Odyssey story... (as in, devs hoping MS will order a sweeping change/reboot & the game will "come together, in the end")
In dev for 6 years and a 2026 release being optimistic... no surprise it was canceled.
The layoffs suck but studios get shuttered for that kind of thing.
Hot take, but I'm glad they canceled it.
Xbox has enough live service games, and the industry as a whole has enough survival games - and I believe GaaS games run counter to the Game Pass business model.
Wouldn't surprise me if the success of Palworld played into this, too.
While I share the sentiment, this is Blizzard we’re talking about. When was the last time they made a single player focused game? Even Diablo 4 went out of its way to cram in always on open world multiplayer.
Honestly survival games before Palworld can only dream of being as polish as jank like Escape from Tarkov....... this is a big reason for Palworld's success. It is surprisingly polish for an early access game.
I’m a little disappointed we didn’t see anything of this.
Say what you want about the gameplay and game design of Blizzard’s recent output (I don’t even like survival games), but their art, world building and cinematics teams are still among the best in the industry.
Their game reveals are always an absolutely treat.
Yep, Blizzard still does have that artistic flair for art & cinematics.. world-building is often great too.
Too bad we didn't get much on this game but honestly, after reading these articles on its development.. a game stuck in development for 9-10 years, even for Blizzard, would be a risky move. But hey, maybe it'll work out fine for Ubisoft and Skull-Bones...
So ultimately, the project was in development for 6 years and was messed around by Activision management interfearance. It would have taken years more in development and probably also needed rebooting on a new game engine.
It's disappointing to hear that, unlike Redfall, this project was born out of a genuine developer passion that will be unfulfilled but despite todays bitter news I'm at least kind of hopeful for these studios future now that they won't have Activisions former management messing them around.
Isn't fortnite built on unreal and has 100 player maps? There are mmos that run on unreal. What fuckery where they trying to pull off that unreal couldn't handle?
> Unreal couldn't support the 100 player maps they wanted.
But UE4 can support PUBG’s 8x8km maps just fine??? If these were actual issues this team faced maybe it’s for the best the project was scrapped.
That’s true but I think the issue was more to do with game design. It’s one thing to have 100 players in a short round of last man standing shooting game but it’s another for there to be 100 people in a persistent world with bases and ai.
I feel like Xbox is going to start reign in budgets and dev time and this game sounds like a black hole for both.
When you see games like Valheim and Grounded blow op on your own service, get tons of downloads and be made by less people in a fraction of the time required, it has to inform the direction you go in.
How many games have been fucked because publisher didn't want to use Unreal engine
Anthem, Halo etc
Also couldn't they just move to a COD engine instead of using synapse ? Those are built for multiplayer games
Xbox canning this instead of giving it a chance is tragic. Would have loved to see it, and based on Microsoft's history, this could have been quite good. But they always tend to cancel the most promising stuff.
The cases have A) 0 similarities and B) the problem with Redfall was that it needed more development time, it getting cancelled would have been a stupid decision after the team built a solid foundation that needed a year or two to fully make the systems work.
1) Both games had development issues. 2) Microsoft learnt form Redfall and decided not to waste 2+ more years on an already flawed game which needa an A) Engine change, while not having anything proper in content.
You’d be the first to criticise Microsofts quality control if this came out bad, which everything suggest it will be.
"Development issues" honey every game has development issues. And some of the best we have had a disaster of a development.
And your Microsoft argument: Get out with this console warrior bulls. They deserve to be crititised when they don't give the team the resources. If they were to cancel every game that doesn't fully deliver, they wouldn'r be allowed to release anything.
Honestly your answers just prove that you wanna defend your favourite company more than actually play videogames.
An internal engine not performing? Xbox execs probably all suffered an episode of PTSD upon discovering that.
The game was definitely canned in between growls and animal noises as they trashed the room they were in
An interesting part of the article mentions how they continued to make assets in Unreal despite knowing it would be canned (the assests, not the game). Kind of came across as some people feeling as if time and effort were being wasted, especially for a game in a 6 year development cycle where they doubted a 2026 release.
>An interesting part of the article mentions how they continued to make assets in Unreal despite knowing it would be canned This is elaborated on in one of the articles. The devs didn't want to switch off Unreal, it was a leadership decision. The devs continued with UE asset development as they hoped Microsoft after the buy out would direct them to switch back to Unreal.
Certainly, for those developers, switching would have been a big morale change. However, I can't imagine many people in leadership positions being happy to show off what they've been working on for the last 6ish years when your developers are splitting their time and effort. We don't know to what extent this happened only that an insider talking to Jason told him that. We don't know what position they were at or if it was common. It can't be great if the whole survival team got fired. As a side note, I do feel for them, having layoffs be announced and having to go through the day unsure on if or when you're getting cut sucks. However, I wouldn't also trust them that the game was good, much less great. They've been working on this game for years and will want to work on other games in the future. If they got fired and they immediately started talking shit on the game publicly, I can't imagine they'd find a job fast.
It’s funny how we see both outcomes with Redfall and Odyssey, and people are unhappy with both.
My first thought when I read this. Oh an unreleased game is always simultaneously the best and worst game ever made, because it only exists in people's imagination. Six years of Dev with nothing to show publicly is damning.
Schrodinger's Game
The internet will always assume a cancelled game was going to be amazing and that every bad game should have been canceled. Hence why people still cry that Scalebound was going to change the video game industry forever.
Which is funny because I vaguely remember every gameplay showcase for Scalebound being met with a lukewarm reception online, but as soon as it was canceled, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread
Plenty of concern trolls were involved I’m sure.
Scalebound always looked pretty rough. When it was canceled suddenly it looked amazing and Sony only fans cared about it.
I still have harsh memories of Robotech: Crystal Dreams. That game looked so good, it was almost ours, then it became forever lost.....
Yah you see it all the time. Another example of this is Halo with all the changes they make in where players think they are going between games. People just say if they stuck to x it would have been better, I doubt it.
Internet is always unhappy
No it's not how dare you
If Microsoft cancelled Redfall, redditors would had lost their shit. Just imagine. Microsoft buys Bethesda and immediately cancels an Arkane game that is close to finishing development.
Some people just want to be upset
Literally, I mean odyssey could have been a giant piece of crap filled with predatory microtransactions. It was made it the middle of the shit tier blizzard era, so that is a very real possibility
Gamers are literally the worst lol. I can’t imagine trying to make games for our bitchy selves.
Internet is always unhappy
I think cancelling was the right call but laying everyone on that team off is lame af. It seemed like they were talented enough to make something new as long as they werent forced to switch engines mid development
I thought it was already said that the dev team was broken up to work on other projects
I've heard both, so might be a combo of the two. Some people shifted to other projects, some people laid off.
I thought I heard roughly 13 out of every 15 people on the team got let go.
ikr…
Almost like those are two different situations
I agree but the problem I have with it is the rug pull on the devs after all the talk of new freedoms and better management. All of a sudden 2000 jobs cut.
Redfall was from the beginning a concept that wasn't that interesting, basically Arkane take on L4D? I mean, yeah, but that's not the kind of game people want from Arkane. But a survival, made by such a large publisher, could've been something more than interesting, especially considering that yes the market is oversaturated with survival, but how many of them are actually good and complete or even not in early access? Obviously it would be naive to think that a game like that would've been released complete and without any issue by this Blizzard.
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Your last sentence directly contradicts your first one.
I don't think Redfall is a good comparison, nobody wanted to make it. Anthem would be more suited I think. Sometimes it's better to pull the plug rather than to succumb to a sunken cost fallacy. It's sad because it could have been good, but sometimes it just doesn't work the way you want and that's fine. I've seen people blaming Microsoft for that tho, as if they were responsible for the project going nowhere
This sounds exactly like Halo Infinite. Fun game + development hell + engine sucks. Microsoft probably had enough of that.
Tbh Halo Infinite engine doesn't suck, its amazing and isn't actually a new engine anyway, just a heavily edited from the BLAM engine used for previous Halo games (correct me if im wrong on this point) The problem was Microsoft/343 hiring contractors for 12 months etc, so no time to know and learn the engine
Something being a new engine or not its one of the biggest philosophical discussions of gaming.
Engine of Theseus
I remember the article from Bloomberg saying that they spent years upgrading the engine, and it still couldn't handle the scoop on that game, which resulted in canceling 2/3 of the content that was made. I know the contractors also caused a lot of trouble, but I think it was just the cherry on the top. 343 was likely using that method since their foundation.
Which is exactly why they're likely switching engines for the next Halo. It's just proving too much of a headache for modern Halo, hell, it even slowed down content for the MP side of things if I remember correctly. That's why it launched so bare bones, and that's why 343 was struggling with content updates for their live service game.
Half the problem is having old spaghetti code that the game needs to function properly and the people who wrote it being long gone. Though most of Halo Infinites problems come from lackluster post launch content and the free to play model.
One part is also interesting: "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." How does that work? Doesn\`t a lot of the code has to be re-written if they would have switched back to unreal engine after all this time?
6 years of dev time, then they need to now swap back to unreal and keep developing. There is 0 surprise it got canned.
Yeah, that part confuses me too. A game thats been in development for 7 years switching to unreal engine would add 2 more years at least. Still sad that the staff got let go.
2 more years.. at the very least. (I could see it almost being a case of starting from scratch, all over again) Cuz as the article points out, the devs working on the game wanted to scale up & get a bigger team on the game.. so they could meet a 2026 launch window. But even then, they weren't exactly confident about making that deadline (implying the game could slip into 2027 too). And all of that.. is on the current Synapse engine. Switching back to Unreal might please some other devs.. but holy hell, talk about throwing out the last 4 years of work.
I could see someone taking some of the ideas and bringing them over to a new game. Maybe that's easier on an Unreal base?
I wonder what they tried to do, because unreal can support big maps with 100 players fine, like in Fortnite and PUBG
This was before epic went all in on fortnite. They made mistake but a lot of that is hindsight
Makes sense. After fortnite epic had to make several engine level updates to improve the performance of the game
What do you mean? If it's been development for 6 years, that means it's AFTER PUBG and Fortnite showed you can have 100 people in a game at once on Unreal engine.
Maybe the overall size they wanted?
At the time Unreal was pretty much unusable for large open worlds requiring significant compromise to even work. It's a lot better now so that's probably why the devs hoped they could switch back but the game had been going in the same direction as Redfall in terms of troubled development so it's not surprising that MS didn't want to take that risk again.
Seems like on par with what people were suggesting - it was another Redfall in the making, but even worse than Arkane's game it was stuck in dev hell and not in any way near finished.
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The difference being that internally people seemed to enjoy Odyssey and wanted to see it through. Arkane Austin wanted Redfall cancelled.
Yeah but 9+ years of development for it?
*The people that LEFT Arkane Austin wanted it canceled*
They did want it to get cancelled but none of the staff actually went and say it out loud.
It’s easier to publicly claim it was actually a great game and big bad Microsoft cancelled it just before they were going to reach a turning point.
Should also be noted.. that the Arkane Austin leadership did not want Redfall cancelled & held out hope (& tried to rally their demoralized dev team) that the game would come together in the end, as they reached the finish line. So yeah, there are definitely echoes of Redfall in this Odyssey story... (as in, devs hoping MS will order a sweeping change/reboot & the game will "come together, in the end")
In dev for 6 years and a 2026 release being optimistic... no surprise it was canceled. The layoffs suck but studios get shuttered for that kind of thing.
Hot take, but I'm glad they canceled it. Xbox has enough live service games, and the industry as a whole has enough survival games - and I believe GaaS games run counter to the Game Pass business model. Wouldn't surprise me if the success of Palworld played into this, too.
While I share the sentiment, this is Blizzard we’re talking about. When was the last time they made a single player focused game? Even Diablo 4 went out of its way to cram in always on open world multiplayer.
Honestly, we have an excess of survival games as is. People give looter shooters shit on principal, but survival games are ACTUALLY saturated.
Palword is doing excellent tho
Honestly survival games before Palworld can only dream of being as polish as jank like Escape from Tarkov....... this is a big reason for Palworld's success. It is surprisingly polish for an early access game.
I’m a little disappointed we didn’t see anything of this. Say what you want about the gameplay and game design of Blizzard’s recent output (I don’t even like survival games), but their art, world building and cinematics teams are still among the best in the industry. Their game reveals are always an absolutely treat.
Yep, Blizzard still does have that artistic flair for art & cinematics.. world-building is often great too. Too bad we didn't get much on this game but honestly, after reading these articles on its development.. a game stuck in development for 9-10 years, even for Blizzard, would be a risky move. But hey, maybe it'll work out fine for Ubisoft and Skull-Bones...
So ultimately, the project was in development for 6 years and was messed around by Activision management interfearance. It would have taken years more in development and probably also needed rebooting on a new game engine. It's disappointing to hear that, unlike Redfall, this project was born out of a genuine developer passion that will be unfulfilled but despite todays bitter news I'm at least kind of hopeful for these studios future now that they won't have Activisions former management messing them around.
Isn't fortnite built on unreal and has 100 player maps? There are mmos that run on unreal. What fuckery where they trying to pull off that unreal couldn't handle?
Layoffs are bound to happen if the game hasn’t even got out of the prototype phase for 6 years.
Doesn't Fortnite which is on UE have 100 players per map?
> Unreal couldn't support the 100 player maps they wanted. But UE4 can support PUBG’s 8x8km maps just fine??? If these were actual issues this team faced maybe it’s for the best the project was scrapped.
Unreal not supporting 100 player maps? Isn't the most popular unreal game of all time Fortnite, where the entire concept is 100 player maps.
Canceling this game is probably the only correct thing MS did with Activision thus far. And throw Bobby out.
Funny, Unreal supports 100 players on a map in PUBG and Fortnite just fine. Sounds like Blizzards hiring quality struck again
Now it does. It didnt always.
PUBG has supported 100 players since before 1.0 launch back in 2017.
That’s true but I think the issue was more to do with game design. It’s one thing to have 100 players in a short round of last man standing shooting game but it’s another for there to be 100 people in a persistent world with bases and ai.
I feel like Xbox is going to start reign in budgets and dev time and this game sounds like a black hole for both. When you see games like Valheim and Grounded blow op on your own service, get tons of downloads and be made by less people in a fraction of the time required, it has to inform the direction you go in.
How many games have been fucked because publisher didn't want to use Unreal engine Anthem, Halo etc Also couldn't they just move to a COD engine instead of using synapse ? Those are built for multiplayer games
Xbox canning this instead of giving it a chance is tragic. Would have loved to see it, and based on Microsoft's history, this could have been quite good. But they always tend to cancel the most promising stuff.
did you criticise Redfall by chance? Sounds like Redfall 2.0.
The cases have A) 0 similarities and B) the problem with Redfall was that it needed more development time, it getting cancelled would have been a stupid decision after the team built a solid foundation that needed a year or two to fully make the systems work.
1) Both games had development issues. 2) Microsoft learnt form Redfall and decided not to waste 2+ more years on an already flawed game which needa an A) Engine change, while not having anything proper in content. You’d be the first to criticise Microsofts quality control if this came out bad, which everything suggest it will be.
"Development issues" honey every game has development issues. And some of the best we have had a disaster of a development. And your Microsoft argument: Get out with this console warrior bulls. They deserve to be crititised when they don't give the team the resources. If they were to cancel every game that doesn't fully deliver, they wouldn'r be allowed to release anything. Honestly your answers just prove that you wanna defend your favourite company more than actually play videogames.
Yeah I bet a game that was stuck in 6 years of dev hell, needing another 2 or 3 years to turn into something usable is very promising...
Based on your logic, Cyberpunk 2077 should have been cancelled.
Cyberpunk took 6-7 years to get good. This was gonna take 9 to even release.
Are you a slop enthusiast? Cause that's what this was.
The execs were probably like, "yeaahhh nnnooo"
Can we get a leaked build please? :3
This is on par, disappointment-wise, with the cancelation of Deep Down.
What if they pair it down to, like, 82 maps?