Blizzard - More on New Survival Game

PC Gamer added some tidbits of information on the new game recently announced by Blizzard. Its development is apparently well on the way.

Blizzard's survival game has been in development for almost 5 years

It's in a playable state, but we still have no idea when it'll be out.

Blizzard clearly isn't ready to share many details about its upcoming survival game, because the only title for the game it's given us is "Unannounced Survival Game." Enigmatic! The non-announcement has at least allowed current and ex-Blizzard developers to speak openly about their involvement, and based on their comments, we've learned that: A) people with knowledge of the project are pretty hyped about it, and B) it's been in some form of development for more than four-and-a-half years.

Unannounced Survival Game's development is being led by Craig Amai, who said on Twitter that the game started as a "humble pitch" on his PC. According to Amai's current LinkedIn profile, he left the World of Warcraft team and started leading the survival game team in July 2017, four years and seven months ago.

Amai has had a long career at Blizzard. According to his resume he joined the company in 2004 as a senior game master who offered "varying capacities of in-game customer support, primarily for World of Warcraft." He later became a senior designer on WoW, and then lead quest designer, working on the MMO all the way until he started on the survival game in 2017.

We also know that the survival game is in a playable state, because Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra said on Twitter that he's "played many hours" of it with the dev team. A smaller detail I noticed today is that Geoffrey Virtue, executive producer of Teamfight Tactics at Riot, co-led Blizzard's survival game between 2019 and 2021.

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More information.

Blizzard wants to Survive(al) in 2022

Does anyone know if it's a PvP survival-game or if it's more oriented to single-player ?

When I think back to the better days of Bliz and early days of WoW and how amazing that was for the early years, I think, damn, Bliz COULD make an amazing survival game. Then I wake up and realize today's bliz is NOTHING like Bliz of old and the chances of anything I personally want anything to do with coming out of Bliz are very slim.

Got a phone? Pretty sure he along with the clown posse all the way to the top that approved all that are still around.

Along with interesting design decisions Bliz #1 priority IMO has been maximization of profit first with anything actually game related being a clear and sometimes distant #2.

Originally Posted by henriquejr
Does anyone know if it's a PvP survival-game or if it's more oriented to single-player ?

This since I have zero interest in anything online PvP. So I'm 99.9% sure it'll be online PvP.

SINCERELY doubt it'd be purely single player in this day and age and Bliz' current ways.

Forced online with all kinds of shop options and extra services like charging you $10 for an avatar name change is more likely.

Indeed. Those days of Blizzard games actually being good are long past, I had a blast with the warcraft games that came out in the nineties, and to me that's when the company hit heights it would never see again. Even with the blizzard net thing possibly not being needed anymore, I don't see any future Blizzard products being of interest to me.

So how long has it been in development?

Survival games are not a genre I'm interested in.

I enjoy survival games, especially if they are creative. Subnautica was probably my game of the year at the time. But this is Blizzard, so I doubt it will be single player focused. I'm guessing something like Valheim, which I haven't actually played, but my understanding is that you can single player it, but that's not the focus.

I played Valheim for a while. It’s a surprisingly enjoyable experience solo or in co-op, and I don’t normally like survival games. I’d love it if a AAA studio like Blizzard made something like that as the amount of visual polish they could add would be amazing. However I agree with everyone who said that the days of blizzard (or probably any AAA studio) making games like that are long gone. A game like Valheim doesn’t offer the vast array of monetization schemes that it seems they need to shove into everything theses days. So I’m expecting something with way more paid skins, paid small dlc content, paid progression, etc. it’ll be the Fortnite of survival games if they get their way. I hope I’m wrong as I used to love Blizzard. But $$ is king these days for AAA devs.