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Last summer, seismic news shifted through the world of Xbox as Microsoft cancelled multiple projects and laid off hundreds of developers, with one of those cancellations being 'Project Blackbird', a new MMO from the folks behind The Elder Scrolls Online. It's a shame that this Cyberpunk RPG never came to market, and we're not the only ones disappointed by that either.
Former ZeniMax Online lead Matt Firor has been talking about the unfortunate casualty in a recent interview with MinnMax (thanks, Windows Central). Firor said that he "understood the reasoning behind it", but that news of the game's cancellation was "a pretty devastating blow" nonetheless. After all, Firor "came up with the concept" for Project Blackbird and nursed it through multiple stages of development.
"Making games is always a heartbreaking business. Like, no matter what happens, you could be at the best studio in the world, and decisions happen that impact people, [...] I didn’t agree with what happened, but I understood the reasoning behind it. It is just financial. We’re a number on a ledger, and if that number is large, it is ripe for analysis, shall we say, and that number was always large.
A giant successful video game on the Microsoft level was frankly not that stimulating to them, right? They want a business that they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount, [...] And this isn’t Xbox. This is like all public companies. They want reliable forecastable business. And the entertainment, like the video game industry, just doesn’t work that way sometimes."
Firor seems pretty amicable about the whole ordeal then - to be fair, it seems as though anyone making games in general is half expecting this sort of outcome at various times throughout their career. Of course, it doesn't make the decision any easier on him or his team, but we hope everyone involved can go on to make something great elsewhere.
As for what we missed with Project Blackbird itself, while we never got close to seeing the final product, some Xbox execs were reportedly "blown away" by what was made before its cancellation. We'll link to some of our other coverage on the title down below.