Blizzard is currently recruiting a dozen members of staff to work on an unannounced game.
The open positions include six director roles, including creative director and narrative director.
It’s hard to glean much information about the project from the job descriptions, but it sounds like it’s in the very early stages.
There have been some significant changes at the Irvine, California-based studio behind World of Warcraft and Diablo since Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard last October for $69 billion.
In January, Microsoft announced plans to lay off 1,900 staff across Xbox, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard.
Alongside the news, it was confirmed that Blizzard’s then president Mike Ybarra and its chief design officer Allen Adham were leaving the studio, and that an untitled survival game announced in January 2022 had been cancelled.
Inspired by games like Minecraft and Rust, the project was codenamed Odyssey, was set in a new universe, and had been in development for six years, according to Bloomberg’s sources.
It’s claimed that many of the 100-plus people who had been working on it were told they were being let go.
In a leaked internal email, Microsoft’s game content and studios president, Matt Booty, said the company would be “shifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development”.
Despite these changes, Microsoft has “let Blizzard be Blizzard”, according to Holly Longdale, executive producer and vice president of World of Warcraft.
Discussing what life under Microsoft has been like for the developer during a recent interview with VGC, she said: “If anything, it’s just been helpful. We got time with Helen Chang from Mojang, and we were sharing information, so it’s almost as if we have access to what worked for them.
“We got to speak to the Elder Scrolls Online team and share what we’re up to and what’s been working, it’s almost like we get a benefit.
“There’s no one asking us to do anything,” she continued. “World of Warcraft is doing very well and they’re very proud of what it’s been able to accomplish, so it’s almost like just let it be, and let it keep being awesome. They’ve been tremendously supportive and it’s like ‘let Blizzard be Blizzard’.”
The studio is currently gearing up to launch The War Within, the first of three upcoming World of Warcraft expansions, later this year.
VGC recently had a chance to play The War Within and chat to Blizzard about the expansion.
