Tragically enough, it was on the day exactly two years ago since Blizzard announced that they were working on a fantasy/survival adventure, when Microsoft yesterday delivered the tragic message that 1,900 employees from the gaming division (8% of their total staff) would lose their jobs, including the team making the game - and the game itself was cancelled. A very sad second anniversary in every way.
While we'll likely never get to see this title (although we suspect some concept art and descriptions from ex-workers will find its way online eventually), the Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier has some information on why it was ultimately axed. As previously rumoured, it had been in development since 2017 and had around 150 people working on it. Unfortunately, it suffered from a troubled development and it was still far from being finished, despite being positively tested internally.
Initially, it was planned to be developed with Unreal Engine, but as it wasn't good enough for Blizzard's intended scale with over 100 online players at once, management made the team switch to Synapse. This is a Blizzard work-in-progress engine mainly intended for smartphones, and created a lot of new problems for the project.
The most positive people from Blizzard hoped that the game would be finished in 2026, "but even that seemed overly optimistic to some developers", according to Schreier. The team hoped that Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard would let them go back to Unreal Engine again, which probably would have delayed the project even further (switching a game engine mid-development is no easy task), and as a result it was cancelled.
This is not the first time Blizzard has killed off a project that has been in development for a long time. The most infamous one is probably Starcraft Ghost which was put on "indefinite hold" in 2006, despite looking insanely promising, but they also cancelled the sci-fi RPG Nomad in 1999 and the class-based MMO Titan in 2014 (later reusing some of it to create Overwatch).
Hopefully some of the assets from the untitled survival game can be recycled in another Blizzard project eventually, but we're still sad it's gone, and even more sad on behalf of the developers both losing their creation and more importantly - their job.